Anxiety is one of the worst mental conditions on earth. Those who suffer know how intolerable it can be. Being nervous is not the same as suffering from chronic anxiety. The latter is a psychological state that emanates from mental trauma or other negative experiences. But did you know there’re many unusual anxiety symptoms, that you might not have known were manifestations of being anxious?
If you happen to harbor the major traits of anxiety disorder, you know how different the world appears to you, and how you in turn respond to external events.
Here are the 11 things you do because of your anxiety.
Related: What Is Chronic Anxiety And Everything You Need To Know About It
11 Unusual Anxiety Symptoms That You Might Not Know Of
1. You always imagine the worst outcomes and start panicking.
Brooding comes naturally to someone suffering from anxiety. You fear outcomes and tend to over-analyze them. To you, not being able to predict the future is not just an impossibility, but a reason for dread and acute uncertainty.
You think that things won’t turn out well. And that the world would respond to your failures in the worst ways possible. Even in social gatherings, you tend to overthink and brood over embarrassing outcomes. You imagine being too drunk at the party, or people laughing at your dressing sense when in reality everything is perfectly alright.
Even the calmest of situations can seem to lurk with unwelcome possibilities, waiting to unfold in front of your eyes. You get overly anxious and throw fits of emotions in the form of panic or rage, thus making things more complicated.
Related: Does Anxiety Cause Shortness of Breath? 16 Signs And How To Manage It
2. You run away from social gatherings to avoid being judged.
This brings us to one of the most common anxiety traits. You tend to cancel trips, plans, social gatherings, etc. Not that you’re an introvert, but because you always have this feeling of getting judged, even by your close ones.
It is true that nowadays our society is infected with judgmental people more than ever, but that never stops us from living our lives or meeting friends, guests, and relatives. However, for you, things are not that easy. The fear of getting judged has become a chronic phobia that keeps haunting you the moment you step out of your door.
Wherever you go, be it the marketplace, college, office, parties, etc you always feel those prying eyes hovering all around you and radiating judgments like heated shards. This makes your social life more and more difficult to lead with every passing day.
Related: 3 Unrealistic Beliefs That Create Anxiety And Depression And How To Be Rid Of Them
3. You’re constantly haunted by the fear of getting caught.
If you’re one of those sufferers who’re adept at concealing your anxiety, then this is something you’d surely be able to relate to. You see, no one likes to make a public display of their anxiety. You tend to keep it out of sight and make sure people don’t catch you suffering from any episode.
But anxiety itself is a peculiar psychological state that creates contradictions. It makes you anxious about your very effort of hiding it, thus increasing the risk of getting exposed. In an attempt to hide your anxiety, you try hard to control your body language and fake your facial expressions.
But your mind keeps prompting you to fear getting caught, thus breaking your confidence in public. No matter how much you try, the uncertainty keeps nudging you to brood more and more about what would happen if your anxiety gets leaked out in the open.
4. You make fewer friends to keep your anxiety at bay.
This is one of the most prominent unusual anxiety symptoms.
People suffering from anxiety prefer smaller friend circles. Not because they’re socially awkward or something, but because they know that more people increase their anxiety level during interactions.
When you interact with two to three people, you tend to be far less anxious than when in the presence of ten or twenty of them. Critics will argue that it doesn’t matter whether it is two or twenty when talking about a friend circle, since no one is uncomfortable in front of friends and close ones, despite their number.
But what they fail to understand is that anxiety doesn’t depend on how close you are to someone. If there’s an interaction, there will be anxiety. Be it a friend or a stranger, sufferers will always be comfortable with a smaller friend circle than hanging out with large groups.
5. You tend to overanalyze everything down to its last atom.
It is characteristic of someone suffering from anxiety to brood over the tiniest of things. Even when people consider them of little to no significance, you take things way too seriously. Your mind is always engaged in a tug-of-war between anxiety and the unwillingness to overthink and complicate issues.
You realize it is nothing but futile to engage yourself in this conflict, but keep falling prey to your anxiety time and again, thus ending up dissecting everything down to its last atom. Since anxiety fuels mental stress, it becomes very difficult for the sufferer to remain calm and tactfully handle every situation.
Thus, your mind triggers an unwanted panic that only propagates anxious thoughts and sensations in you.
Related: 33 Lies Your Anxiety Tells You
6. You dread the future rather than welcoming it.
To people suffering from anxiety, the future is something to be feared as opposed to something to be anticipated. This happens because the mind of an anxious person always tends to process negative outcomes.
To them, the chances of achieving positive results are always thin, and they somehow live under the impression that negatives always consume the positive, despite all the attempts.
When suffering from chronic anxiety, this bugs the mind day and night, thus distorting the normal thinking pattern of the patient. The ability to relax and remain calm is totally overcome by the fear of the future, thus worsening things.
7. You replay past actions and conversations in your mind.
As someone suffering from anxiety, things never go smoothly for you. Your mind keeps going back and forth as to what you said or done in the past, even when you’re totally relaxed. Anxiety never gives a warning. It happens all of a sudden.
You’ll find yourself in an episode that starts out of nowhere, and without any reason. This is random and can make you panic. The more you tend to brood on your past actions, the more it weighs down on you. You feel as if the past events are haunting you and trying to warn you about the present and future.
But these episodes are of no help, since the past is already gone, and brooding over it is futile. You know this but can’t help it. While people take lessons from their past and move on, your anxiety keeps you in a perpetual loop of guilt, thus making things all the more difficult.
8. You think it’s always your fault.
This is one of the most uncommon anxiety symptoms a person experiences and something that has a long-lasting impact on your psyche.
You feel guilty and start blaming yourself for outcomes that you’re totally not responsible for. Even when people try to make you realize that it’s not your doing, you keep pointing fingers at yourself, thus extending the episode.
Related: 11 Things People With Anxiety Want You To Know
9. You keep comparing yourself with others.
As someone suffering from anxiety, you always have your mind telling you that you’re not good enough. That whatever you do or achieve is done much better by others. It is a sort of inferiority complex coupled with chronic anxiety.
You keep comparing yourself with others and feel uncomfortable by the very thought of lagging behind others. You have a sort of false premonition of how people would react when they find out about your shortfalls and weakness, especially as compared to others.
Even when you’re successful in life, you tend to compare your success rate with those of others just to make sure you are ahead of them. But this in turn is fueled by anxiety by making you feel undervalued and incompetent as compared to others who have achieved the same thing, but to you, with greater efficiency.
10. You obsess over the tiniest details, and strive to be a perfectionist.
Since you’re always anxious about others surpassing you, you always try to be perfect. You never leave a stone unturned to make things as precise and accurate as possible. But this harms your mental health more than it does any good, if at all.
While in a free market economy, competition is the key to success and is considered healthy, taking it too far can cause mental stress. This stress not only leads to chronic discontent but can also cause stress-related ailments.
Not only your anxiety is fueled by this twisted sense of achieving perfection, but your mental health is getting affected. You’re always plagued by the sensation of doing things in the best possible way, so as to rule out the possibility of getting outdone by your peers.
11. You get irritated easily when certain situations don’t go according to your plans.
None of us are adept at controlling every situation we’re in. Yes, we can plan things and formulate strategies, but it’s not possible to have control over every probable factor that can cause the event to go astray. But anxiety restricts you from understanding this.
When things don’t go according to your plan, you tend to panic and envision all the repercussions it can have on the future. The fear of losing things to uncertainty grips you at your core and makes you suffer episodes of delusions and even panic attacks in extreme cases.
Peculiarly, it sometimes manifests as fits of rage in an attempt to resist any further stress. This sucks out all the peace and positivity from the atmosphere, leaving behind a mind filled with fear and uncertainty.
Related: 5 Signs Your Anxiety Hijacked Your Intuition (And How To Get It Back)
Do you experience any of these unusual anxiety symptoms or weird anxiety habits? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!
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