Can Anxiety Make You Feel Sick?
Having some bouts with anxiety is part of the human experience. Whether you are starting a new job, meeting new people, or going on a first date, it’s common to experience the familiar uncomfortable feeling throughout your entire body. Your heartbeat will become faster, you will find it harder to talk or form sentences, you will become more self-conscious than usual, and you will experience some common physical symptoms. While it is normal to experience this from time to time when are the physical symptoms of anxiety too high to function normally? In the following article, Counseling of Southwest Florida and our Florida addiction therapy professionals take a closer look. So, can anxiety make you feel sick? Continue reading below to learn more from our experts.
Can Anxiety Cause Nausea?
Can anxiety make you sick and cause nausea? Yes, depending on the grade of anxiety that you are feeling, it is common for people to experience nausea. Anxiety is a form of the fight-or-flight response, and this makes your nervous system go into a form of overdrive that mimics an adrenaline rush. This fight or flight response controls your respiration, heart rate, digestion, and many other regular functions that your body undergoes. This is also responsible for common physical symptoms like sweating or blushing.
Why does anxiety cause nausea? When someone is extremely prone to bouts with anxiety or sensitive to the flight or fight response, this stimulation could cause nausea. Since anxiety affects the nerves all over your body, someone’s digestive system and stomach are especially susceptible to nervous stimulation because of the large collection of nerves in the stomach. Some of the most common symptoms of anxiety-related nausea are:
- Generalized nausea
- Stomach cramps
- Loss of appetite
- Diarrhea or constipation
- Indigestion
Can Anxiety Make You Throw Up?
Can anxiety make you sick and cause vomiting? Since anxiety and anxious responses could stimulate the stomach and digestive system, it is possible to throw up. In fact, many professional athletes report that they vomit before games because of the anxiety and nervous energy that they feel before it.
It is commonly accepted that the mind and the stomach are linked because of the number of nerves that they both have. This can often be seen in how different foods cause people to experience different moods and emotions. When someone is especially sensitive to anxiety or nervousness, the turmoil that they experience in their mind is experienced in their stomach. This could later lead to vomiting.
How to Relieve Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
For many, the most uncomfortable aspects of anxiety are the physical symptoms that accompany it. The most common physical symptoms that are related to anxiety are:
- Constant nervousness or uneasiness
- Increased heart rate
- Rapid breathing
- Sweating
- Trembling
- Feeling weak or tired
- Trouble concentrating
- Trouble sleeping
- Gastrointestinal (GI) problems
- Constant worrying
- Avoiding things that trigger anxiety
These symptoms can be hard to control, but as expert therapy for anger management and anxiety, we can provide some useful tips on how to relieve the physical symptoms of anxiety.
The principal tip that we would like to give is to regulate your breathing and breathe more slowly when you feel that these symptoms arise. This is a therapeutic practice since it gives someone suffering from anxiety something else to concentrate on than what is causing their anxiety. Aside from this mental or therapeutic effect, breathing deeply and slowly also slows down the heart rate.
It is also important to distract yourself from whatever is causing your nervousness. This could be through music, physical exercise, or playing a game on your phone. The key is to remove yourself from the situation that is causing your spike in anxiety.
Sometimes, the key to relieving anxiety is to face it head-on. Once you practice this with whatever causes your anxiety, it will become much more manageable.
More About Counseling of Southwest Florida
We are a practice that is dedicated to providing our customers with some of the most specialized treatment services available. This involves both marriage counseling in Florida and mental health counseling in Fort Myers. We make an effort to help our patients with both their mental health issues and whatever addiction issues they may be facing, thanks to our grief and loss therapy training, batterer intervention training, and group therapy for bipolar disorder. Contact us today to learn more about what we can offer you.
Casey is the founder and CEO of Portner Counseling Group (PCG), a counseling center in the Fort Lauderdale area, which specializes with issues related to drug and alcohol use. Casey has completed focused course work on the physiological aspects of drug addiction and human psychology, as well as received extensive training on the treatment of co-occurring disorders.