Can anxiety cause real physical symptoms?
Anxiety is intensely physical and causes real body symptoms. They include racing heart, chest tightness, breathlessness, dizziness, tingling, stomach churning, trembling and exhaustion. This is adrenaline doing its ancient job at the wrong moment. The symptoms are real, measurable and not imagined.
The trap is the loop: symptoms trigger fear of illness, fear triggers more symptoms. Many emergency visits for chest pain end with this diagnosis, which is good news wearing a scary costume.
New chest pain still deserves proper assessment once. After the heart is cleared, treating the anxiety, breathing training, CBT, sometimes medication, treats the symptoms at their source.
See a doctor promptly if
- Chest pain or tightness brought on by exertion and relieved by rest, or pain spreading to the jaw, neck, back or arm
- Chest pain with sweating, nausea, vomiting or a feeling of impending doom: call emergency services, do not drive yourself
- Fainting or near-fainting with palpitations, especially during exercise
- Palpitations with a family history of sudden cardiac death or heart muscle disease under the age of 50
- Sudden breathlessness with sharp chest pain worse on breathing in, or a swollen, painful calf
- Thoughts of harming yourself, or feeling you cannot keep yourself safe. Contact emergency services or a crisis line now
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Answered by the AskDoc Medical Team · Medically reviewed under our Medical Director, MBBS · How we review
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