ANXIETY AND STRESS
SYMPTOMS

Social anxiety occurs when you are around other people. It could be experienced as feeling nervous, awkward, or edge, or having a hard time being yourself with others. Or it might show up as a tendency to worry about what other people are thinking about you and their judgements or criticisms of you.

Separation Anxiety is an intense anxiety or fear of being separated or abandoned. It is natural for humans as social beings to desire attachment and not want to lose our loved ones. Yet separation anxiety goes beyond this, where there is a frequent fear of losing someone. An example is someone who when their partner goes away on a trip, gets very triggered with both fear of losing them and possibly also becomes angry at their partner for leaving or abandoning them.

When we are anxious about something, we have an unconscious tendency to avoid it or delay it somehow. This can show up as problems with chronic procrastination, or avoiding people or situations that we are uncomfortable with.

Traumatic events are usually unexpected and overwhelming, and leave us negatively impacted by them. Afterwards we might experience a number of symptoms including increased anxiety, hyper-vigilance, anger or irritability, avoidance of the person or place of the event, and either repetitively thinking about the event or having all or part of the memory blacked out.
Traumatic events often happen when another person is dominant, aggressive, or abusive, and our boundaries are crossed or violated. We can then feel shut down, frozen, trapped, and powerless. This happens commonly in abusive relationships, but some milder forms of trauma happen to most children, and at other times in our lives. Traumatic events can also happen in car accidents, surgeries, falls, or injuries.

The obsessive part of this condition is negative thoughts or worries that keep on repeating or looping. The compulsive part of this condition is behaviours or things the person feels compelled to do to alleviate or address the repetitive negative thought and decrease the anxiety. Yet the pattern of the same negative thoughts, and then the same repetitive compulsive behaviours, continues ongoingly. Examples include a person who keeps on having worries about getting sick, and feels compelled to wash their hands over and over. Or a person who regularly gets anxious about the safety of their home or car, and then needs to recheck that it is locked multiple times.

Phobias are specific fears of certain situations, activities, or animals. The anxiety and fear of this lead the person to go to great efforts to avoid exposure to the trigger.
The person may have a fear of snakes or some other type of animal, or they might have a fear of heights, or there may be a specific activity like public speaking that is feared and avoided.

This happens when a person becomes anxious or afraid when they leave their house. This can often be accompanied by social anxiety, since the person is likely anxious that they will see other people.
A person with agoraphobia can become a prisoner in their own home.

When people have ongoing worries that they are going to get sick or die, or that something is wrong with them physically, yet the medical testing rules out any causes for concern, they may have Hypochondria. This is a delicate issue because sometimes people with medical issues do not get clear answers from testing, and there may actually be an undiagnosed medical issue.
Yet in many instances, and especially if the person is anxious in other ways in their life, Hypochondria is suspected where the person’s anxiety focuses onto their body and their health without due cause. One example is a person who feels anxiety in their heartbeat, and then keeps on worrying that they are going to have a heart attack, despite testing showing that their heart is healthy.

Panic Attacks are the result of two levels of anxiety. The first level is some of the physical symptoms of anxiety that discussed at the top, like having a faster heartbeat or rapid breathing.
What happens in Panic Attacks is that there is then a second level of anxiety that comes in, when the person starts becoming very fearful of some of the sensations and experience in their body. Instead of being able to stay in calm or curious awareness about the way anxiety is showing up in their heartbeat or in their breath, in panic the person instead becomes very anxious about the anxiety or stress symptoms themselves and often starts having catastrophic thoughts that they are going to die. This severe form of anxiety can feel so out of control and extreme that the person is vulnerable to either fainting or passing out.