We are used to relating anxiety with breathing problems, with nerves, with being accelerated, without However, we never consider that the opposite could happen and that you could feel tired extreme.
Have you ever felt excessively tired despite having slept well? Have you had an anxiety attack and then felt a drop in blood pressure? Have you been feeling dizzy? Have you been sleeping too many hours lately and still feel tired?
Next, in Psychology-Online we will see not only the different symptoms of anxiety, but we will also answer the question of whether extreme tiredness may be due to anxiety And, if so, we will answer the why of this anxiety symptom.
Index
- What is anxiety?
- Psychological symptoms of anxiety
- Physical symptoms of anxiety
- Extreme tiredness from anxiety
- Extreme tiredness can have other causes
What is anxiety?
What is anxiety and why does it occur? Anxiety is a feeling scared or uneasy. It can be a normal reaction to a stressful situation and even beneficial since when faced with a difficult situation, such as a presentation at work or an exam, prompts you to work harder on it.
However, for many people, anxiety becomes an added problem to the one they already had and is no longer useful, even becoming an obstacle to coping with their day-to-day life.
Depending on the reasons for the anxiety, we would have different types, such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder Y phobias.
Even if a person was not diagnosed with one of these types, still anxiety can be a big problem And the first step to solve it is to make sure if we have anxiety or not. For this, we recommend you go to a professional. Meanwhile, you can check if you have symptoms of anxiety with the Hamilton anxiety test. Next we will see what symptoms anxiety has, both psychological and physical.
Psychological symptoms of anxiety.
What are the symptoms of anxiety? Anxiety is caused by something we are thinking about. Therefore, a key symptom is intrusive thoughts about situations that concern us. Have you ever found yourself thinking over and over about something that hasn't happened yet but that you fear will happen?
The person, in addition, invests great amounts of effort and energy in suppressing these thoughts, which leads to avoid certain situations related to what worries you and that affects you in different areas of your life such as in the family, in socially or at work, you can have many conflicts and, ultimately, you can not have a life normal.
In the most extreme cases the person may come to believe that he is dying of a heart attack. The feeling of leaving one's own body can also develop during the anxiety attack (depersonalization) or the feeling that everything is happening as if it were a movie (derealization). In this article you will find different types of anxiety and their symptoms.
Physical symptoms of anxiety.
As we have discussed before, some of the more physical symptoms of anxiety are well known. Examples of this are hyperventilation, thechoking feeling or shortness of breath, increased heart rate, feeling of a knot in the stomach or tremors.
Due to all this overexertion that the body is making, it can become exhausted, producing at the moment a feeling of dizziness. In addition, if the anxiety occurs constantly it is quite common for the body to end up exhausting itself and a feeling of permanent fatigue is produced since the energy that prompted the body to move has been depleted in anxiety attacks.
Extreme tiredness from anxiety.
Anxiety, therefore, can reach produce fatigue since, at the moment in which anxiety occurs, the body uses a high effort and high energy to make the heart beat faster or the rate of respiration to increase. Therefore, after an anxiety attack, it is quite common to suffer a sudden drop in energy.
In addition, it is quite common to keep thinking about what has caused the anxiety since it is usually a situation to which we give a lot of importance. This concern and dedication to the cause of anxiety can also occur during sleep, either through dreams or by not allowing a good rest, causing insomnia. For this reason, you do not get a good rest or, if you manage to get to sleep, you usually do not reach the deep phases of sleep, so the body never regains energy lost during bouts of sleep. anxiety.
Over time, this fatigue is accumulating getting to seriously affect attention or performance at work. In addition, continually thinking about what worries us can cause emotional fatigue. This refers to exhaustion as a result of fighting with yourself, your own thoughts and the attempt to eliminate them and show positive emotions constantly, which also implies a loss of energy important. In some cases, fatigue can follow an anxiety attack, while in others, that fatigue can be more chronic.
Therefore, yes, extreme fatigue can be due to anxiety. Due to the characteristics of the anxious state and the symptoms and consequences of anxiety, such as lack of sleep and rest, they lead the person to emotional, mental and physical exhaustion.
Extreme tiredness can have other causes.
Although extreme tiredness is also a symptom of anxiety, being tired doesn't necessarily mean it's anxiety, but it may be a sign that you are suffering from depression or some other type of medical condition, so neither this nor any of the other symptoms alone are sufficient to diagnose the anxiety. In this article we talk about the possible causes of tiredness.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Can extreme tiredness be due to anxiety?, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.
Bibliography
- Iruarrizaga, I., Gómez-Segura, J., Criado, T., Zuazo, M., & Sastre, E. (1999). Anxiety reduction through social skills training. Electronic magazine of motivation and emotion, 2(1).
- Sierra, J. C., Ortega, V., & Zubeidat, I. (2003). Anxiety, anguish and stress: three concepts to differentiate. Mal-estar e subjetividade magazine, 3(1), 10-59.
- Ramírez, M. T. G., & Hernández, R. L. (2007). Emotional exhaustion scale (ECE) for university students: psychometric properties in a sample from Mexico. Anales de Psicología / Annals of Psychology, 23(2), 253-257.
