Have you ever had anxiety just grab ahold of your stomach?? Oh my, I have!! 

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Anxiety is fear based and our minds telling us something is a threat to us. It is a natural response to stress which has been in place from the earliest days of human kind. 

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Originally, anxiety was supposed to be the brain's way of alerting us and motivating us to danger. Back in the early days of human development, anxiety may have sounded like this: "Hey there! A vicious Knid is coming!! RUN!!" Today anxiety may sound more like: "OMG!! The power bill is due!! PAY IT NOW!!"

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Now, paying the power bill is probably not an emergency, unless its off (lol) but when a person experiences anxiety, its like their brain is giving them a signal that something that is not a true emergency IS an emergency.

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Did you know that experiencing high levels of anxiety can be bad for your health" True 'dat!" as they say. When the body experiences life as if everything is an emergency can be exhausting! The sensation of 'emergency' is just icky and often brings on physical responses such as sweating, dry mouth, uncomfortable butterflies or a twisting feeling in the stomach.

 

These physical symptoms occur because the autonomic nervous system has been triggered to respond in "fight or flight" preparation. This floods the body with hormones that signal the body to stop all unnecessary actions in order to be ready to scatter or defend itself. The heart begins to pound more rapidly to get blood to the legs for running, and breath becomes more shallow to help the body exchange gases more quickly when the running starts. 

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If you DO have to run or fight, these changes would be exactly what you needed... but what if you are having these changes just 'whenever'? What if your body is constantly perceiving threat when there is none? If your body is going into fight or flight mode over and over again, this means that all these hormones are being dumped into your system repeatedly. While these hormones are natural, they are for preparing the body for a life-threatening emergency, not for experiencing every day, or maybe constantly. 

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People who experience this flood of hormones on a daily basis, or maybe live with anxiety all the time, are actually 'teaching' their systems that everything is an emergency and that they must be on high alert all the time. When a person has 'chronic anxiety', this means that the body is dumping too much of these hormones into the body too much of the time. 

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Long term effects of chronic anxiety include: a constant sense of doom, the root of panic attacks, chronic feelings of nausea and loss of libido along with other things (check out image on the left).

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Check out the Resources page where you will find further information on managing anxiety. 

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Good mental health!

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