The problem with anxiety is that the symptoms you experience can feel completely alien, and that’s what I struggled with most at the beginning.

My body was doing things it had never done before and everything felt strange and unfamiliar, it felt like I was living in another body. Before anxiety, I’d been lucky. I’d never been seriously ill or had any physical problems. By all accounts, I was fit and healthy, which actually made anxiety even more confusing.

All of a sudden I was experiencing chest pains, dizziness, shaking and buzzing sensations, sometimes I felt like I had a cold liquid running through my veins. At times my mind and body would feel numb, blank or disconnected.

It was disorientating, frightening and deeply confusing, because none of it made any sense to me.

The Part No One Tells You About Anxiety Symptoms

If you have ever tried to explain your anxiety symptoms to someone and watched their face slowly go blank, you are definitely not alone.

You start describing strange sensations in your body. Pressure, pulling, dizziness, tightness, buzzing, sickness. Halfway through you can hear how ridiculous it sounds, even though it feels absolutely real to you. You start to question your own sanity. Even yesterday when I went out for a walk it felt like someone was pushing me in my back and at the same time it felt like my chest was being pulled forward, I felt off balance and uneasy on my feet and started to struggle to breathe. It sounds utterly ridiculous to yourself let alone telling someone else.

These sensations used to scare me, my immediate thought would be, "this isn't right! Somethings wrong" which would led to more panic and more sensations. Now I just try to laugh at the stupidity of it all and brush it off as best I can or play cricket with the sensations.

The truth is anxiety symptoms are not neat or logical. They are hard to describe, impossible to predict and often nothing like what people expect anxiety to feel like. And that alone can make you feel frightened and completely misunderstood.

Because when you are experiencing them, they do not feel like anxiety at all.

When the Symptoms Make No Sense

Most people think anxiety is just worry, racing thoughts or feeling nervous. To put that in context, by nature I'm not a nervous person, I'm confident, outgoing and love doing adventurous activities. So the feeling of nervousness and worry from Anxiety is very different to being nervous before a first date or going into a business meeting.

Anyone who has lived through it knows anxiety can create an endless list of physical sensations. Some feel muscular, some neurological, some deep inside the body and others impossible to put into words. there is often a sense of dread or sadness for no reason.

And the most confusing part is the sensations do not stay the same.

One hour to the next it might be dizziness.
The next it is stomach problems.
Then headaches appear.
Then chest tightness.
Then just as you start to adjust, it all changes again.

Just when one symptom settles, another one seems to turn up to take its place. That constant change is exhausting and it convinces you something serious must be wrong. You start chasing symtoms round your body, trying to put them out like a fire. Unfortunately this adds more fuel to to the Anxiety Loop and keeps you stuck. You can often be expereiencing many of them at the same time.

Why Anxiety Symptoms Keep Changing

People often ask why symptoms move around the body or seem to evolve over time.

The reason is simple, even though it does not feel reassuring at first. Anxiety is not attacking specific organs or body parts. It is activating your nervous system.

When your nervous system becomes sensitised and stuck in fight or flight, it can create almost any sensation the human body is capable of producing. Muscles tighten, breathing changes, digestion slows, blood flow shifts and adrenaline floods the system.

All of that is real. The sensations are real. But the danger is not.

That is why symptoms can appear suddenly, disappear just as quickly and then return in a completely different form.

Nothing is breaking. Your system is reacting. And when you can get your head around that, you can start changing how you react to the symptoms. Instead of reacting with fear, you can talk to your body calmly and reassure it everything is ok.

Why Symptoms Feel Worse Outside Than at Home

Another thing that confuses people is how different anxiety feels depending on where you are.

At home you might feel uncomfortable but safe enough to cope. As soon as you go out into public spaces everything seems to intensify. The dizziness increases, your breathing feels off, your legs feel weak and your body starts screaming at you to escape.

Outside environments bring more stimulation, less control and fewer obvious exits. Your brain interprets that as danger even when you are completely safe.

So your nervous system turns the volume up.

It is the same anxiety, the same body and the same system, just responding differently to its surroundings.

I've got a point now where I feel safe at home and can turn the volume down on the symptoms as they crop up, I'm still learning to control the volume when out and about.

The Weird Symptoms No One Warns You About

Some anxiety symptoms do not even sound connected to anxiety at all, sometimes they don't even feel like a human experience. Which adds to the fear.

• Internal vibrations.

• Buzzing sensations.

• Pressure in the head or face or other parts of the body

• Pulling under the ribs.

• Jelly legs.

• Hot flushes.

• Numbness or tingling.

• Feeling unreal or disconnected.

• Cold liquid running through your body

• A sudden jolt to the body

• A constant sense that something is off.

These are often the symptoms that convince people something serious is happening because no one ever warns you about them. They hit you out of the blue and in any situation. For me they started at the gym and when I was driving, then they were happening everywhere and anywhere until I was consumed by them 24/7.

They are hard to explain, hard to Google and terrifying when they appear for the first time.(In fact everytime they appear until you learn to break the cycle).

But they are extremely common when the nervous system has been under prolonged stress.

When Familiar Symptoms Feel Completely Different

One of the hardest things to explain about anxiety symptoms is that you actually have felt some of these sensations before, just not like this...

You have had headaches in the past.
You have been dizzy before.
You have had tight muscles.
You have felt sick.

You know what those things normally feel like.

That is exactly why anxiety symptoms are so unsettling, because they feel completely different.

Take dizziness for example. Most of us have felt dizzy at some point in our lives. You stand up too fast or you have not eaten properly. It is unpleasant but familiar.

Anxiety dizziness is not like that.

It can feel floaty, heavy, disconnected or like your head is not quite attached to your body. Not spinning exactly, just unstable and wrong. It's like a constant buzzing feeling in the background that you are suddeny going to pass out. And because it does not match your previous experiences, your brain instantly decides something must be seriously wrong.

The same goes for headaches. Anxiety head pressure often does not feel painful in the usual sense. It can come out behind your eyes or in the base of your neck. I've even felt it, that someone has been pushing my eyeball out from behind the socket, you can't quite work out where the pain is coming from. It can feel like pressure, fog or a tight band around your head, it can make your vision go blurry and fuzzy and it becomes hard to concentrate and focus. Sometimes enough to call it pain, but always enough to feel frightening.

Muscle tightness is another big one.

If you have ever trained hard or played sport, you know what tight muscles feel like. That heavy aching stiffness after rugby training, going for a run after a down period or a tough gym session.

Anxiety tension is nothing like that.

It is duller, deeper and more constant. It often sits in the shoulders, neck, and chest and no amount of stretching or massages seems to shift it. That is because it is not caused by exertion. It is caused by your nervous system staying braced for danger that never arrives.

Even feeling sick feels different.

When you are ill you understand what is happening. You rest, lie down and let your body recover.

Anxiety sickness is different. It is not just nausea. It is a deep unsettled nervous feeling mixed with weakness and dread. You cannot rest it away because it is not coming from your stomach. It is coming from your nervous system.

That difference is what really messes with your head.

Anxiety does not give you brand new sensations. It gives you familiar ones distorted by fear. Close enough to recognise but different enough to terrify you.

The other really unsettling thing about them is you can experience them all at once or they can move around the body and pop up at different times.

Why Googling Anxiety Symptoms Never Brings Peace

When symptoms feel strange, most people search for answers. It used to drive me mad, because I couldn't find the answers I was looking for. I couldn't describe the pain I was feeling or where the pain was coming from to determine what was actually wrong. Doctors would look at me blankly, even telling my family and friends they couldn't understand it. I would be so frustrated not being able to explain it.

It was only when I spoke to people who had experienced Anxiety and Panic Disorder that I actually thought, they get it. I'm not going completely mad. This is real. It was like an ah-ha moment! I'm not alone, maybe this is normal in this situation. Understanding it was my nervous sytem and linked to the Vagus nerve, I could start to rationalise what was going on. That was probably the moment I started to recover.

I stopped googling

• Symptoms of Anxiety

• What causes Anxiety

• How to stop dizziness.

• Why do I feel like this.

• What is this buzzing feeling I have

• Can anxiety cause this.

• Why does my chest feel so tight

The problem is reassurance never lasts and looking up those symptoms can give you a host of other ailments and illnesses which can lead you down a slippery path of thinking do I have this or that.

Because anxiety does not want certainty. It wants safety.

And no amount of Googling can give your nervous system that.

Each new symptom pulls you straight back into the cycle again, not because you are failing but because your system is still on high alert.

Ultimately, frustraingly even, it's just Anxiety!

It's Just Anxiety!

I hate this saying and love it in equal measure. "It's just anxiety" makes it sound almost pathetic, and you should just "man up" and get on with it. Being nervous or worried is a just a poor excuse. At least that's what I used to think, but Anxiety can be crippling, it can stop you from living and feeling like yourself. I became house bound with Agoraphobia, couldn't do simple activites, socialise or pretty much live. But then I came full circle and realised it is Just Anxiety!

For all the symptoms and pain and discomfort I have had in the last 2 years, it is "Just Anxiety", there isn't anything else wrong with me, I'm a healthy individual. My body isn't failing me, I'm not just about to have a heart attack or pass out or fall over. So now when symptoms crop up and I'm feeling uncomfortable, instead of googling them and trying to fix them, I tell myself it's just anxiety, you'll be fine!

And that shift alone has been one of the biggest parts of my healing.

What Anxiety Symptoms Really Are

I used to think all the symptoms I'd get with Anxiety was my body failing and that I was about to die. But really the symptom's and sensations are not dangerous, even though they feel frightening.

They are signs of a nervous system that has been under prolonged stress from worry, fear, burnout or trauma and has forgotten how to fully switch off.

Mine came from a prolonged period of being under immense stress. Stress I wasn't fully aware of, or not aware of what it was doing to my body anyway. One day my body and nervous system decided it had, had enough and was going to switch on the fire alarm, and it's been ringing ever since.

Why Recovery Is Not About Removing Anxiety Symptoms

One of the biggest misunderstandings about anxiety recovery is believing you have to get rid of symptoms first.

I spent days and weeks trying to put the fires in my body out. Healing does not come from fighting them or monitoring them constantly. It comes from slowly reducing your fear of them.

As fear softens, adrenaline reduces.
As adrenaline reduces, tension eases.
As tension eases, symptoms lose their intensity.

They fade not because you forced them away but because your nervous system no longer needs to shout.

Recovery is rarely linear. Symptoms may come and go for a while, but each time you respond with less fear, your system re-learns safety.

A Final Thought

If your symptoms do not make sense, that does not mean something is wrong with you.

If they change constantly, that is actually a good thing, or at least that’s what my Mum used to tell me when I was explaining how I felt for the hundredth time.

She would say,

“If the symptoms keep changing and moving around your body, there can’t be anything majorly wrong with you. Even if they do feel really shitty.”

It sounded like twisted logic at the time, but annoyingly… it actually makes sense.

Sometimes you need a bit of a mother’s tough love!

At the time it used to frustrate me. I’d be sitting there feeling awful, trying to explain how bad I felt, and hearing that would irritate me because I still couldn’t understand why I was feeling the way I was.

But over time, I learned she was right.

If I really were having a heart attack, I wouldn’t suddenly have jelly legs, then dizziness, only for the chest pain to disappear completely. A heart attack doesn’t jump around your body.

The pain would stay in your chest.

And I don’t think anyone has ever had a heart attack that turns up randomly throughout the week for two years.

When doctors have run blood tests, done ECGs and told you everything is working fine, at some point you have to begin trusting that. You have to accept that the sensations you are feeling are not a heart attack or whatever other illness your mind is convincing you of in that moment.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

When you’re in a state of fear, logic goes out the window. It’s incredibly hard to compartmentalise symptoms or think rationally when your nervous system is screaming at you.

But healing often starts with repetition and repeating mantra's to yourself

• "This is just anxiety"

• "I am safe, my body is working as it should"

• "Thank you body for working to protect me ut I am safe now"

• "This is just nervouse arousal"

• "This to shall pass"

• "This may feel uncomfortable right now, but soon it will be gone"

Even when you don’t fully believe it yet.

Because eventually, your nervous system begins to listen and you start to feel calmness in your body again.