The Most Common Anxiety Symptoms

Most Common Anxiety Symptoms. Patterns And Lessons.

Everyone wants to talk about the most common anxiety symptoms. I get it. Your symptoms feel important. They’re scary and you see them as dangerous. In many many cases with it comes to anxiety disorders, the symptoms of anxiety become the source of the anxiety. Fear of fear is often based on fear of the most common anxiety symptoms – fear of your own body. Let’s talk about that this week.

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The Highlights

ALWAYS advocate for your own health . Consult qualified medical professionals when needed. I am always assuming that you have done this – or are doing this – and have been told (maybe many times) that you are healthy and that your symptoms are the result of anxiety. I cannot diagnose you physically because I am not a doctor, nor would I diagnose you in a podcast even if I were a doctor.
I rarely ever talk about anxiety symptoms – even the most common anxiety symptoms – because trying to address symptoms, fix them, prevent them, or cure them is rarely part of actually solving this problem.
We need to start from the premise that it isn’t your anxiety symptoms that matter, but rather your interpretation of those symptoms and your reaction to those symptoms that matter most. The reaction, and the fear are the problems, not the bodily function.

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It’s OK to get useful productive assurance that your symptoms are just anxiety. Your doctor(s) should be providing that for you. I can provide it once in this podcast episode. Please be mindful of the habit of returning again and again to the same questions because your fear insists that the doctors and everyone else might be wrong. When you engage in constant seeking of reassurance because you want 100% certainty, you will wind up stuck because there is no such thing as 100% certainty in life.
The objectives of this episode is to show you that you are not alone in what you are experiencing, to show you that many others are experiencing the same scary sensations, and to shine a light on the idea that even scary and uncomfortable anxiety symptoms are natural and safe.
When you experience anxiety symptoms, your body is just doing what human bodies do when they are afraid. There is nothing wrong or broken there. Your body is just reacting to fear the way its supposed to react to fear. This just happens inappropriately because you fear the anxiety iteself.
I asked my Facebook group – for the first time ever – to go ahead and list symptoms in the comments of a thread. There are 9500 anxiety sufferers in that group and over 125 people commented within two hours of my post. In this episode I spent 5 minutes reading the symptoms that people shared in the group. Listen closely. Hang on there when it gets boring or monotonous.
The fact that hearing symptoms for five minutes gets boring and monotonous is part of the point. Look at the patterns. Look at how the same symptoms repeat again and again and again.
What does this tell you? Could it me that all these people are in danger all the time but none are actually harmed? Is everyone narrowly escaping death or permanent incapacitation? Are you – and everyone else – always just dodging bullets? How? How is your house or your spouse or your essential oils saving you?
The takeaways here are that you are not alone, that your symptoms are not unique, special, or dangerous, and that your body is doing what anyone would expect a frightened body to do. You’ve just decided that your body is a threat to you.
It’s OK to be afraid of your symptoms and initially focused on them. That’s not a crime. Everyone starts there in recovery.
But if symptoms are not the problem, then what are you supposed to do to get better?
This is about learning that you are safe, that your body is operating as designed, and that the path to “better” lies in dropping the fight and allowing your body to take care of itself, even when that’s scary and difficult.
There are 236 episodes of The Anxious Truth before this one that go into detail on the recovery process. Other excellent podcasts that provide more detail are linked below.