HOW DO I KNOW IF I HAVE ANXIETY? 10 SIGNS TO WATCH - ARTE - 2025

Knowing if you have anxiety by observing the symptoms is very important to be able to treat it properly. Anxiety is one of the most common psychological disorders, which occurs in a greater number of people and that each of us may experience at some point in her life.

However, it can often be difficult to detect what sensations respond to an anxiety disorder and when an anxiety disorder is actually being experienced.

Is anxiety always bad?

To properly interpret anxiety as a psychological symptom, first of all we must mention that anxiety itself does not always have to constitute a mental disorder.

In fact, anxiety is interpreted as a mental and physical activation mechanism that people use on multiple occasions in our lives.

People can experience anxiety when we have a lot of work to do in a short time, when we want to achieve a specific goal or when we are studying a vitally important exam.

In this way, anxiety appears every time we need to activate in a special way to perform certain tasks.

However, when this activation appears in a context in which there is no reason why we should activate more than normal for our optimal functioning, what is called pathological anxiety appears.

In these cases, people suffer abnormally high arousal and experience many difficulties to reverse the situation, return to a state of greater tranquility, or calm down.

This fact highlights the difficulties in differentiating the normal or adequate activation of our body with anxiety and the psychological state that characterizes it, which can be very annoying and unpleasant.

10 signs to discover if you have anxiety

Trouble sleeping

Possibly the main characteristic that occurs in anxiety disorders is trouble sleeping.

With sleep problems, it is not referred to specific days in which it is difficult to fall asleep or days in which one wakes up earlier than usual, but continuous and repeated problems in the attempts to rest properly.

A person with anxiety will most likely have trouble falling asleep at night despite having undergone notable physical and psychological exhaustion during the day.

So even though you may feel tired or in need of rest, it is often very difficult for an anxious person to fall asleep when lying in bed.

This fact is explained due to the over-activation both physical and psychic that a person experiences with an anxiety disorder.

Anxious individuals have increased brain activation at all times of the day and have a hard time diverting their attention from their thoughts throughout the day.

Thus, when they are tired or go to bed, they have a hard time doing the simple mental exercise of avoiding extreme thoughts in order to get to sleep.

In order to sleep adequately, people need a minimum state of calm and relaxation, which is why people who cannot achieve it have many difficulties falling asleep.

Muscle tension

Another fundamental aspect that characterizes states of nervousness is muscular tension. As we have been remarking, when anxiety appears there is an immediate increase in the activation of the mind and body.

In this way, the muscles of the body, instead of being relaxed and with a normal tone for most of the time like most people, they are in constant tension.

To better understand it, we will put the following example:

Anxiety is that brain mechanism that allows us to put our body in gear before situations that require a quick and effective response.

For example, if you are in the middle of the forest and you hear a threatening noise, your anxiety will allow you to activate your body in the appropriate way so that, in an emergency, you can respond appropriately.

In this way, one of the main actions that your mind will perform on your body will be to strongly tension the muscles so that they are ready for action.

If this state of anxiety occurs only during this situation, the muscles will be strongly tensioned for a limited period of time, and as soon as the threat disappears, they will return to their normal tone.

However, when you have pathological anxiety, your mind will be activating your muscles continuously throughout the day, every day.

In this way, if you suffer from anxiety, your muscles will become more and more tense, you will be unable to relax them and most likely you will feel back or neck pain.

Physical discomfort

For the same reasons we discussed earlier, anxiety can cause a great number of physical aches and pains. As our body is permanently activated, it can never relax and we begin to experience certain annoying sensations.

The physical sensations that can be experienced in anxiety can be diverse, however, the most common are usually the typical "nerves in the stomach."

This sensation is characterized by a series of unpleasant discomforts in that part of the body that are interpreted as nervous sensations, as if the nerves were stored in the stomach.

This is because the intestine is an organ highly sensitive to psychological stresses, so we experience the permanent activation of that part of the body as very annoying and unpleasant.

Likewise, these sensations can cause us bloating, gas, constipation or other digestive problems. However, "the nerves in the stomach" are not the only physical discomfort that anxiety can cause.

Palpitations, increased heart rate, sweating, tremors, a feeling of suffocation, chest tightness, instability, dizziness or nausea can be other physical symptoms experienced in anxiety.

Uncontrollable thinking

Another characteristic of anxiety is the inability to control thought. When anxiety appears in our mind, it takes total control and prevents us from stopping it when it causes us discomfort.

The thoughts begin to arise without any control, they slide through our mind with total freedom and, sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we are not able to stop them.

So, no matter how annoying the thoughts we have and even if we want it to disappear, it continues to function as if it had a life of its own.

It is as if the hemorrhage of emotions and sensations that anxiety causes have more control over what we think than we do.

In this way, tranquility is seen as unattainable, since we are only able to pay attention to our thoughts, which increase and increase our state of anxiety.

Excessive worry

Likewise, the uncontrollable thoughts described in the previous section do not usually have a pleasant and optimistic content.

Quite the contrary, they tend to focus on aspects that cause us a lot of concern and increase our feelings of anxiety and nervousness.

In this way, worries appear in the mind without any kind of control, and they get bigger and bigger, making an endless loop with our physical feelings of anxiety.

Irrational fears

In some cases, excessive worries can turn into totally irrational fears about different aspects.

These anxiety problems are known as phobias, and are characterized by being excessively afraid of a specific aspect for no reason.

These irrational fears can appear before any element (snakes, spiders, heights, blood, etc.) or situations (when driving, when interacting with other people, when being alone, etc.).

Likewise, the person who suffers from them is capable of interpreting them as irrational but despite being aware that it makes no sense to have such an extreme fear, they are unable to extinguish and / or reduce it.

Once again we are faced with the uncontrollability of thought, it begins to produce highly anxious and unpleasant content, and no matter how many efforts are made, they always seem to win the game.

Perfectionism

One of the most common traits of people who suffer from anxiety is perfectionism and the need to do things in the best possible way.

In this case, perfectionism in itself is not a sign that shows the appearance of anxiety, but it can explain the origin and maintenance of this type of disturbance on many occasions.

Perfectionists will have a greater motivation to do things properly but at the same time will have a less sense of control when perceiving the imperfection of many of the elements that surround them.

In this way, a very perfectionist person can experience high states of anxiety about aspects that would go unnoticed by other people who do not focus so much on details.

Feeling insecure

Insecurity is a common symptom in most anxiety disorders.

This sign is characterized by the emergence of a certain sensation in which feelings of uncontrollability are experienced, difficulty in recognizing what is appropriate and the absence of stimuli that reaffirm the control of things.

In fact, many anxiety disorders can originate in the absence of control of aspects that are constituted as vital for a person.

Does my job guarantee me a stable future job? Will I be able to improve my relationship with my partner and marry her? Did I choose the studies I did well and will they guarantee me to find a job?

Aspects like these can generate a feeling of lack of control in the person who experiences high states and emotions of anxiety.

In these cases, the central axis of anxiety can be this lack of security and the need to be constantly activated when making vain attempts to achieve greater control of the situation.

Difficult to focus

When you are anxious or extremely nervous, concentrating and thinking clearly is often a highly complicated task.

The reason is that proper concentration requires a remarkable amount of energy and a total direction of our attention towards a specific stimulus.

However, an anxious person will have his mind in constant operation, investing high levels of energy in maintaining the permanent thoughts that define his state of anxiety.

In this way, when the person is about to change their focus of attention and ignore their thoughts in order to concentrate on any task, their brain usually ignores them.

For the anxious mind of a person with anxiety, the anxious thoughts that he has inside seem to be much more important than any other aspect, thus, changing his mind and getting him to focus on other things is often difficult.

Restlessness or impatience

Finally, the last sign that characterizes anxiety and that is very useful to detect this type of state is restlessness or impatience.

Nervous people often have a lot of difficulties to calm down so their body will be permanently active and restless.

Likewise, this state of over-activation will cause the person to appear highly impatient before anything.

The body of a person with anxiety is faster than the rest, so he expects things to work at the same speed as him. When this does not happen, feelings and thoughts of impatience appear instantly.

References

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