After being subjected to a lot of stress or anxiety due to a specific situation in your life, you may begin to feel physically ill. For example, you start to notice that your throat hurts a lot and you start to worry. What does this mean? Is pain the cause of anxiety? What does it mean that pain is the cause of anxiety?
If you are interested in finding answers to these questions and knowing how to relieve this annoying pain, keep reading! In this Psychology-Online article, we will talk about the Anxiety Sore Throat: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment.
Index
- How to know if the sore throat is due to anxiety
- Anxiety Sore Throat Symptoms
- Causes of anxiety sore throat
- Anxiety Sore Throat Treatment
How to know if the sore throat is due to anxiety.
When determining whether the cause of a sore throat is anxiety or not, it is important rule out any medical pathology or serious physical changes that explain the pain. In addition, the appearance of pain must be associated with the experience of stressful events or the accumulation of anxiogenic experiences for a long time.
Anxiety sore throat symptoms.
How does anxiety affect the throat? The main symptomatology of anxiety sore throat is associated with symptoms which we will show you next:
- Associated respiratory difficulties.
- Altered and shortened breathing.
- Muscle tension.
- State of alertness and hypervigilance.
- Irritability.
- Increased heart rate.
- intrusive thoughts and/or ruminations.
- Feeling weak or tired.
- Sleeping problems.
- Dizziness and tremors.
- sweating
- Panic attacks.
- Avoidance of specific situations that generate anxiety.
Causes of anxiety sore throat.
Stress can lead to anxiogenic responses as a result of the brain areas it activates and the hormones and substances involved. In fact, it causes a decreased GR (glucocorticoid receptors) in the hippocampal granular cells, a disinhibition of the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis and an increase in corticosteroids.
Thus, if we are faced with a situation with high levels of glucocorticoids, our body will lower the levels of the receptors to defend itself and prevent them from being activated. In this way, a disinhibition is produced as a consequence of the decrease in the activity of the corticoid receptors, of the axis adrenal and an increase in corticosteroids, which increases the anxious response and produces physical damage in different areas of the brain and the Body.
In short, what is shown is that high levels of anxiety and stress cause a decrease in the immune defenses of the human body. Therefore, being subjected to situations with these characteristics often makes us more prone to contracting viral or other diseases.
Anxiety even causes physical ailments that had been kept hidden until now to surface. For all these reasons, we see that sustained stress and anxiety can cause sore throats. For this reason, the exam periods have been determined as a risk to the physical integrity of the students. If you know someone who is going through it, in this article you will see how to help someone with anxiety.
Anxiety sore throat treatment.
Before starting treatment to get rid of a sore throat due to anxiety, on the one hand, it is very important to go to the doctor to be examined to ensure that the ailments are not associated with any condition medical. In addition, it is also necessary to determine if the use of any medication is necessary to treat a sore throat, be it codeine, ibuprofen, paracetamol or others.
On the other hand, if pharmacological treatment is necessary, it must be accompanied by psychological monitoring. For this, the patient must undergo a clinical psychological interview to determine the variables and factors that are maintaining the anxious symptomatology and the inputs that have caused it to lead to physical ailments.
In short, sore throat due to anxiety must be addressed with a multidisciplinary treatment in which treat the physical discomfort of this part of the body, as well as the symptoms associated with anxiety through of psychotherapy. Specifically, this will consist of putting into practice relaxation techniques and stress management, in addition to addressing the cognitive alterations associated with sore throat.
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 Anxiety Sore Throat: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.
Bibliography
- American psychiatric association, (2014). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM – 5. Madrid Spain. Pan American Medical Publishing.
- Belloch, A., Sandin, B., Ramos, F., (2009). Manual of psychopathology, volume II. Madrid. McGraw Hill / Interamericana de España, S.A.U.
- Ezpeleta, L. and Bull, J. (eds.) (2016). developmental psychopathology. Madrid: Pyramid Ed.
- Martino, P., Scaglia, R., & Cervigni, M. (2019). Test anxiety and susceptibility to infectious diseases. In Seventh International Congress of Research in Psychology.
