Table of contents:
- How can anxiety and worry cause body pain?
- Stress response
- Intestines and stomach pressure
- Minor illness
- Chronic anxiety sufferers can experience constant worry and anxiety
Anxiety and worry are natural for everyone. However, without realizing it, anxiety can actually affect your body and cause you to become physically ill. But how?
As it turns out, a bad experience can cause the body to activate a stress response which will cause emotional changes in the body. As a result, these emotional changes can increase the body's ability to handle threats (one of which is in the form of stress). And usually, when stress occurs, the body will try to restore the state.
However, if stress occurs too often, the body will take longer to recover. As a result, the body will be in a "alert" state. When the body has been in a "standby" state for too long, the body's performance will be disrupted which can cause various kinds of physical, psychological, and emotional problems. Of course, these problems can involve many systems, organs, and glands that are affected by the stress response.
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How can anxiety and worry cause body pain?
Here are some ways anxiety can make you sick:
Stress response
According to a study, anxiety can interfere with the production of the hormones serotonin and adrenaline. As a result, when you feel worried, you will experience nausea. That's because when you're feeling anxious, your gut sends a message to your brain that you should be afraid and cause nausea.
Intestines and stomach pressure
Without realizing it, worry can put a lot of pressure on the stomach, including stomach acid. This can affect the process of digesting food and water in the body. So most of the time, when you feel anxious, you will feel that something is wrong with your stomach.
Minor illness
Every day, your body fights against germs, viruses, or even bacteria that will and have entered your body. And it turns out, without realizing it, anxiety can weaken the immune system. The result can cause feelings of pain, such as nausea, coughing, flu, swollen lymph nodes, dry tongue, dizziness, or stomach pain.
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In fact, the symptoms that arise due to anxiety are not dangerous. These symptoms occur in response to the body's stress or anxiety that is being experienced. Even so, still the symptoms of illness that are experienced will cause discomfort.
Chronic anxiety sufferers can experience constant worry and anxiety
Everyone feels anxiety for different reasons. Usually this worry is triggered by situations such as before an exam, before the first date, before speaking in front of many people, and so on. But for people with anxiety disorders, akaanxiety disorder, anxiety often comes for no apparent reason, and the attacks appear and disappear continuously over many years.
People who experience chronic anxiety experience prolonged periods of sadness and pessimism, never-ending tension, and persistent cynicism or suspicion. It turns out that doing so can put you at double the risk of developing ailments including asthma, arthritis, headaches, stomach ulcers and heart disease.
So, it's clear that too much stress can make a person feel sick. This happens because stress hormones can affect the body's nervous system and other systems such as organs and glands in the body. In addition, prolonged stress will be followed by illness or flu because stress hormones can suppress the immune system and make the body more susceptible to germs, bacteria, or viruses.
So, if there is a question whether anxiety can cause pain? The answer is very clear, namely: yes.
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