Anxiety

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Can you get physical anxiety? What it is?

Our bodies make stress hormones that prepare us to run, hide, or fight when we're in danger.
Those hormones make physical reactions in our bodies.
Our heart will pump faster to give energy to our vital organs.
Blood pressure goes up.
Breathing rate goes up to give us more oxygen.
It might make us tremble or be shaky.
Muscles tense.
Our digestion might be affected because the hormones go through our intestines.
We are designed to eliminate waste when stressed, so we can run faster.
That's why people sometimes feel queasy.
We might lose our appetite, or feel a need to eat more.
Most people will have tunnel vision and only focus on the problem.
We can't usually sleep well because our bodies perceive a threat to our safety.
Sometimes the hairs on our skin even stand up, like they would on an animal.
It's all a way of maintaining our body temperature for survival.

Most of this is what normally happens to me. When I'm mildly anxious I don't have my appetite, I wake up with a cramping tummy that doesn't stop no matter how much I massage it, my heart beats faster, and I feel very tense like I'm jumping out of my skin. In extreme cases in the past, I would wake up early (before 5am) with an itch right in the middle of my back that I couldn't reach. Every time I tried to scratch my back with something such as a ruler or a marker, the itch would move around somewhere else on my back and drive my insane. Thus, I would end up just rolling around in bed trying to scratch my back all over for sometimes over an hour. My anxiety is triggered by several things including intense phobias, worrying about people canceling, worrying about not having anything to do that day, and worrying about people when they're sick. So yes, that's my version of physical anxiety. It's not fun waking up with a tummy ache, unable to get back to sleep, and not much of an appetite, or feeling like I just want to drink my nasty drink that I haven't had in almost a year just to calm myself down and destress. The good news is, anxiety (at least for me) isn't an every day thing. I have a lot of good days, some mildly anxious days, and even fewer bad days. Also having mild episodic depression and being stressed out a lot doesn't help though, but that's a story for another day.

Many people with PTSD have these symptoms non-stop for years. Their bodies are in a constant state of hyperarousal or preparedness for danger. I think a lot of people forget that PTSD is a stress disorder. They think it just means the person is scared of a particular thing, when in reality the "particular thing" isn't always the concern. We know the thing is gone or in the past, but our bodies stay in panic mode. The stress hormones get dysregulated and it's very hard to return to a state of homeostasis.

It's good that you've found some ways to calm your nerves when they act up.