Anxiety: what it is, and what it does to you

An alarm, not a defect

Anxiety is a normal, universal response to uncertainty, danger or pressure. It evolved to get you ready to fight, run or freeze, and in short bursts it is genuinely useful. A little before a presentation sharpens your focus. A flicker of worry about the front door makes you go back and check it. The trouble starts when the alarm keeps ringing and there is nothing to answer for it.

Most of it grows out of not knowing. Waiting for results, walking into an interview, wondering how someone will take your decision. The mind hates a blank, so it fills it with a prediction, usually the worst one available, and then prepares your body for that prediction as though it had already happened.

Ordinary worry, or something more

Everyday anxiety passes when the situation does. It becomes a problem when it is persistent, out of all proportion, or turns up with no clear trigger at all. Then it starts charging you rent:

• ·Avoidance. Turning down the invitation, not taking the highway, keeping life small enough to feel safe.

• ·Physical symptoms that arrive unbidden: a racing heart, sweating, muscles braced for something that never comes.

• ·Slow erosion of the ordinary things, work, relationships, sleep and looking after yourself.

How it shows up in the body

Anxiety is physical, because fight or flight is physical. Clients are often relieved simply to hear these listed, because a symptom you can name is far less frightening than one you cannot.

Heart and chest

Palpitations, an irregular beat, tightness or a dull pain across the chest.

Breathing

Shortness of breath, over-breathing, the sense that you cannot quite get a full one in.

Digestion

Nausea, an unsettled stomach, diarrhoea or constipation, IBS, appetite that vanishes or doubles.

Muscles

Tension and aching, trembling hands, a jaw that never fully unclenches.

Head

Dizziness, light-headedness, tingling in the hands and feet, headaches and migraine.

Sleep

Trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, and waking with none of the rest you needed.

The aim is not a life with no anxiety in it. The aim is an alarm that rings when there is something to answer, and stays quiet when there is not.

In the mood, and in the thinking

Emotionally it looks like irritability, a sense of dread that will not lift, moods swinging between worry, sadness and frustration, and sometimes a strange detachment, as though you are watching yourself from a few steps away.

In the thinking it looks like racing thoughts, poor concentration and a mental fog. Three habits are worth naming, because naming them helps: catastrophising, where you leap to the worst outcome; overgeneralising, where one bad result becomes a rule about everything; and rumination, replaying the same worry long after it has stopped producing new information.

Behaviour follows. Situations get avoided, small rituals appear to take the edge off, restlessness makes sitting still impossible, and for some people alcohol or something stronger becomes the fastest available brake.

The signs people miss

• ·Needing the bathroom far more often than usual.

• ·A sore jaw, worn teeth, grinding you only hear about at the dentist.

• ·Eye strain and sensitivity to light, often with a tension headache behind it.

• ·Hot flushes and cold chills, as temperature regulation wobbles.

• ·Frequent yawning or gasping, which is shallow breathing rather than tiredness.

When to get help

If anxiety has been with you for more than six months, feels far bigger than the situation in front of you, or is interfering with work, relationships or self-care, get support. That may be therapy, medical care, or both. Hypnotherapy here is non-medical, and where something belongs with a doctor I will say so and refer you on.

Within its scope, this work is quiet and often quick. We are not arguing with the alarm or talking you out of it. We go to the part of you that keeps setting it off, find out what it has been protecting, and give it a better job.

Angela Pereira is a certified hypnotherapist and Parts Therapy facilitator in Mulbarton, Johannesburg South, working in person and online. She came to this work through her own hypnotherapy, for a driving phobia that had quietly organised her life.