The Symptoms of Stress are the Physical Symptoms of Anxiety

The symptoms of anxiety of post traumatic stress syndrome can be immediate and can strike without warning.  Sometimes they feel like panic attacks because they are panic attacks.  These symptoms of stress represent physical changes in the body and brain.

Physical Symptoms of Anxiety During Panic Attacks

The Heart: One of the scariest symptoms is chest pain, tightness and pressure. Your heart may beat very hard or fast and feel like it could jump out of your chest. Or you may experience palpitations, where it skips a beat or two and feels like it’s flopping around.

The Body: Excessive sweating from hot or cold flashes can leave you drenched for no apparent reason. You might feel a trembling deep inside or you may be unable to control the outward shaking of your body. Numbness or a burning sensation is common and your hands and feet might tingle with pins and needles.

Respiration: When you feel like you can’t breath, it’s “normal” to panic.  Therefore, this is one of the most frightening symptoms of anxiety for people who suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome.  You’re very conscious of each breath you take and although your rate of breathing increases, it also becomes more shallow. Catching your breath is difficult and the sensation of feeling smothered or suffocating is common.

The Head: Hyperventilation (over-breathing) results in dizziness and lightheadedness. Your vision may blur or you might have ringing in your ears. You could feel unsteady as if things are whirling around or as though your head is swimming and this adds to the fear that you might faint or pass out.

The Throat: Muscles in your throat contract which leads to a feeling of being choked or strangled. Your mouth is dry and it may feel as if there’s a lump stuck in the back of your throat that stops your ability to swallow.

The Stomach: Butterflies or tightness as if you’ve been punched is common in the abdominal area, along with feeling bloated or nauseous. Painful diarrhea and a lack of appetite may leave a tinny or metallic taste in your mouth.

The Mind: It’s difficult to concentrate and your thoughts are running at a hundred miles an hour. Disoriented and confused, it feels like you’re living in a time warp where the world around you isn’t real (derealization). You may feel cut off from your surroundings as if you’re underwater and everything is out of reach (depersonalization). Thoughts of having a heart attack, losing your mind, dying, and becoming trapped are all very common fears for anyone experiencing  anxiety and panic attacks.

So what is the difference between the anxiety symptoms of post traumatic stress syndrome and panic attacks anxiety symptoms?  There is often overlap because post traumatic stress syndrome often includes numerous panic attacks among many stress symptoms and depression symptoms.  Panic attacks are usually brief in duration and are part of other syndromes.  Think of panic attacks as a special cluster of anxiety symptoms.

This topic is vast and hugely important for anyone who wants to understand themselves and others.  How can this be?  So many people have never been through traumas.  Why then is it so important?   It’s so important because post traumatic stress syndrome has certain patterns of thought and feelings that often hold a key to understanding our more perplexing behavior.  This seems to hold true with moderate “traumas” that we don’t usually think of as traumas.

Overcoming panic attacks, anxiety symptoms, and full-blown anxiety disorders can be a daunting challenge.  However, there really are some simple tools and easily-learned skills that can help immensely.  One very useful technique is to change what you say to yourself right when you first become aware of the symptoms of anxiety.  If you suffer from panic attacks frequently, you probably think something like this, “Here we go again…” or “I can’t take this anymore” or “I’ve got to stop this right now” or even “What if I have a panic attack here, of all places!”  

Most people interpret the onset of symptoms in a very catastrophic manner and end up throwing gasoline on the fire.  Here is a three step experiment that you can try when your next panic attack starts with faint electricity in the background of your mind.  

Step 1:  Say to yourself, “The feelings I am having are facts, but how I interpret what they mean is a choice for me to make right now.”

Step 2:  Say to yourself, “I choose to interpret these panic feelings as a severe annoyance, but they aren’t going to kill me.  I know that from experience.  I’m going to ride it out.”

Step 3:  Repeat.

Many panic attacks, anxiety symptoms, and catastrophic thoughts are preventable, but not in the way most people think of “preventable.”  It’s not about trying harder.  Rather, it’s about steadying yourself to outsmart the anxiety.  Get the facts, get the skills and tools, obtain a roadmap that can help you have realistic expectations for your progress in eliminating panic attacks, anxiety symptoms, and the extreme symptoms of stress that can be so frustrating.

I have spoken to many people who have suffered from depression symptoms for many months or even years, but they don’t think of it as depression. Why? Clinical depression is a monster unlike garden-variety blue moods.  While sadness naturally comes from a “normal” disappointment, depression symptoms can morph into a medical condition that engulfs sadness with anger, numbness, extreme symptoms of stress, and can poison a person’s most treasured relationships.

Many people suppose that depression is simply a feeling of overwhelming sadness. If someone has a terrible week, they might say, “I was so depressed.” But what they really mean is “I was very sad.” What doctors mean by the word depression is not the same as the common usage of the term. But if sadness (only one of several clinical depression symptoms) is confused with depression, it is also true that the misery of clinical depression is often overlooked entirely.

Depression symptoms in the form of clinical depression can be like a flying beast that lands on our shoulders and sinks its claws into the brain. Sadness, on the other hand, is more like a bird that lands on our shoulder, but soon flies away. If sadness doesn’t fly away, it can becomes one of the symptoms of depression — clinical depression. So when do the signs and symptoms of depression become a medical condition that needs treatment?  These two important criteria must both be true:

1. The Depression symptoms last for several days (at least 2 weeks)
2. Depression symptoms become disruptive to major areas of a person’s life;  the depression symptoms negatively and noticeably impact relationships, work, or school

To make things more complicated, a person can be clinically depressed without feeling particularly sad at all.  This can make it a bit more complicated to diagnose clinical depression, particularly in men, who reveal their depression symptoms more often through rage than with tears.  Consider for a moment what that means:  a person can be clinically depressed without showing sadness–one of the symptoms of depression most emblematic of clinical depression.   How can this be?

Everyone experiences mood changes as a part of living life. Good things happen. Bad things happen. But depression involves a cluster of symptoms of which sadness is only one. Pouring rain is not a flash flood, but it is part of the combination of factors that produce a flash flood. Clinical depression, or Major Depressive Disorder,  is usually defined as a combination of any five of the following depression symptoms that persist for more than 2 weeks:

1. Sad mood most of the day, nearly every day
2. Noticeable loss of interest or pleasure in nearly all activities most of every day
3. Significant change in weight not due to dieting (weight gain or loss of more than 5% of body weight in a month)
4. Sleep problems nearly every day (excessive sleeping or insomnia)
5. Agitation (irritable attitude and physical tension) or marked slowing of one’s thoughts and actions (e.g., much more difficulty getting started on something than usual)
6. Fatigue or loss of energy every day
7. Feelings of worthlessness or excessive (or inappropriate) guilt nearly every day
8. Diminished ability to think or concentrate or indecisiveness, nearly every day
9. Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurring thoughts about suicide, or a suicidal gesture (deliberate carelessness in dangerous situations) or an attempt, or specific plans.

Most people have experienced one or more of the above depression symptoms at some time in their lives. But when five or more of them combine and take hold, they can cause agonizing distress and can disrupt one’s ability to function well at work, at school, or socially. When this happens the depression is considered “clinical” because it is tenacious enough to need some type of treatment. If a person is having thoughts about death that keep returning, this is almost certainly an indicator of clinical depression, whether or not the person can recognize any other depression symptoms from the list above.

As you can see, a person may or may not feel sadness as their main symptom. It’s the number of depression symptoms, the combination, and the duration of depression symptoms that makes a person begin to see the dark impact on his or her life.

When we have normal, everyday sadness or the blues, our brain bounces back. With clinical depression, the brain starts working in a different way and gets stuck in a mode that can experience some laughter but always returns to the new, depressed baseline mood.  A man or a woman might say, “I am sure that I’m not depressed.  After all, I went to Disneyland and felt really good.  I was laughing and having a good time.”  My response is, “Clinical depression may not keep you from feeling good in a particular situation, but it will wrap it’s tentacles around your ankles and drag you back to a dark place despite your best efforts.”

The upshot to this is that it’s often best to start by really understanding how depression symptoms work and learn the proven strategies for eliminating them.  Then you can be in a position to acquire the right skills by learning to use very practical tools that support those same skills.  This is what my online intensive course on depression is all about.  Knowledge, insight, skill, and strategic life changes together make up the most natural beginning to overcoming depression.