Most people know what it feels like to be anxious before something big.
A conversation. A medical appointment. That sort of anxiety is understandable. It runs, then does whatever it needs to do, and in time it fades away.
Persistent anxiety is different. It waits not for a reason. It does not dissipate once the moment is over. It sticks around, hiding behind the scenes of your day-to-day life, sometimes whispering and sometimes shouting, but always present.
If this sounds like you, then this post is for you.
The Anxiety That Just Won’t Turn Off
There is a kind of anxiety that everyone can relate to – an inference overlay lasting a few seconds, which leads to panic/fear because of something occurring. The body is on autopilot, you power through, and then things return to normal.
It is not how persistent anxiety works. The nervous system remains activated in the absence of an immediate threat. Your body is in a chronic low-grade state of hyper-arousal, and your brain is constantly figuring out why.
You can find that your mind begins to do the whole worst-case-scenario thing without you meaning it to. Or tense in your body for no reason, or waking up anxious because your mind was never asleep.
This Pattern of Anxiety Tends to Manifest As:
- Some kind of fear that you cannot put your finger on and trace back to any one thing
- Wrestling with thoughts, particularly in the evening or during dull periods
- Chronic anxiety over things that seem beyond your control
- Physical symptoms of tightness in your chest, shallow breathing, knots in your stomach or even chronic headaches
- Being jumpy or more easily startled, even in relaxed situations
These experiences are real. They are not you overreacting. They let you know that your nervous system has been in survival mode for too long.
How Persistent Anxiety is Different than Everyday Worry
Worry is something everyone does. It is part of being human.
Anxiety becomes something else entirely when the fear is out of proportion with what may be happening, when it can’t be controlled or managed, and begins to impact how one lives life.
In many cases, the difference comes down to a couple of key things:
Duration
Occasional worry is transient. Chronic anxiety lasts for weeks, months or years with little to no intervals.
Magnitude
The amount of concern does not equate to the real safety or hazard.
Control
You want not to worry, but you cannot – no amount of rationalizing can fix your mind.
Interference
Anxiety is now influencing the choices you make, your relationships, and how you go about your daily life in a way that imposes limitations on how fulfilling your life can actually be.
When anxiety fits these criteria over a consistent period of time, it has crossed the line from normal concern into an area that needs to be properly attended to in order for an individual to move forward.
What Your Body Is Doing
Chronic anxiety is not merely psychological in nature. It is one from head to toe, and knowing that goes a long way toward explaining the exhaustion.
Whenever we have a fight-or-flight response triggered, whether due to an actual danger or an imagined one, your brain acts in the same way and triggers the stress. Adrenaline and cortisol are released. Your heart rate goes up. Muscles tighten. Digestion slows. Your senses sharpen. This is a form of the fight-or-flight response, and it is built to protect you.
The issue is that this system will still be on when you are completely safe. Your brain, on the other side, keeps sending a trail of warning signals, but it never gets a break, and your body slips into panic mode repeatedly.
Chronic Activation of This Can Over Time Turn Into:
- The fatigue that is still there after sleep
- Your muscles may ache or be tense
- Digestive symptoms like nausea, bloating or loss of appetite
- Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
- An impaired immune system and falling sick more frequently
- Difficulty sleeping – whether it’s hard to fall asleep or waking up a lot through the night
This is why chronic anxiety sufferers will tell you they feel exhausted even on days when nothing especially strenuous occurred. The body has been doing a lot of work all along.
The Thought Patterns
Anxiety is not a pure feeling either. Moreover, how your brain sees the territory, some ways of thinking are actually strongly linked with chronic anxiety and support each other in a cycle that often requires outside assistance to disrupt.
Common Anxiety-Driven Thought Patterns Include:
- Catastrophizing: Always leaping into the worst outcome of any scenario, despite all evidence to the contrary
- Threat overestimation: Believing an uncertain or unlikely event is almost certainly going to go poorly
- Extreme (Black & White) thinking: Viewing situations in absolute terms with no grey
- Mind reading: Believing that you know what others are thinking (usually, the thought being that they are judging or disapproving of you)
- Emotional reasoning: Treating your feelings like facts; assuming that if you feel scared, danger must actually exist
These types of thought patterns are not personality defects. These are formed in reaction to experiences and eventually become our default setting. The nature of persistent anxiety is that it feels true even when it is not, and this makes finding relief very difficult in many cases.
The Way Anxiety Begins to Mold Your Life Around It
The quieter but much more vicious side of chronic anxiety is the way it restricts your world and steals ever so completely through your life. Avoidance provides a sense of relief at first. You avoid the event that triggered your nervousness. Then, you refuse the offer that was a little too good to be true. So you remain in circumstances that are safe because uncertainty has begun to feel as if it can never be tolerated.
But avoidance does not solve the problem of anxiety in the long term. It strengthens it. Each time you run away from something because of anxiety, you send a message to your nervous system that the thing was indeed hazardous. The anxiety becomes louder, and the known things become fewer.
Avoidance Can Look Like So Many Things:
- Decreased social invitations or distancing from relationships
- Delaying, especially with respect to medical appointments, as well as financial decisions or difficult conversations
- Staying in unfulfilling situations because the alternative of change is too uncertain
- Overworking or being (too) busy in order to avoid sitting with anxious thoughts
- Reaching out constantly for validation because you dont trust your own judgement
If any of these ring a bell, you are not alone. And admitting them is not an excuse to feel bad about yourself. This can be useful information to help guide your course of recovery.
When Anxiety Has Become Chronic – What Helps
The bright side is that persistent anxiety can be treated. This is not something you just have to power through indefinitely.
However, with appropriate support – the nervous system can be taught to self-regulate differently. Anxiety-inducing thought processes can be recognized and changed. Life can feel genuinely lighter.
These Include Approaches That Are Well Known to Work:
- Therapy – in particular cognitive behavioral therapy
- This includes medication, which, for some people, is able to provide meaningful relief and make room for other healing work
- Grounding
- Mindfulness
- Supportive and systematic exposure to avoided situations
- Sleep, movement and a decrease of stimulants
You Should Not Be Barely Surviving Each Day
Having that deep-seated anxiety is a true trauma to live with. It consumes mental and physical energy that you could be using for enjoying living your life. It has a way of making even the simplest things feel like weights to bear and the future feel uncertain in such an exhausting way.
Here at DESHPA Psychiatric Services, we see patients who feel exhausted from dealing with anxiety. We also provide psychiatric evaluation, therapy, and medication management for anxiety and many other mental health disorders.