Anxiety can cause weird symptoms ranging from excessive fatigue to hallucinations. The more severe the anxiety, the stranger the symptoms can get.
Anxiety and Worry
Anxiety and worry can have a profound effect on a person's mental and physical health. When anxiety forces stress levels to increase rapidly, or when anxiety causes stress levels to stay elevated for long periods of time, the body's reaction can produce some very interesting symptoms. Anxiety can cause weird symptoms that go beyond the traditional anxiety symptoms of headaches and excessive perspiration.
Individuals have varying reactions to anxiety. This is why some people can appear to handle high levels of anxiety without much difficulty while there are other people who appear to crumble at the slightest degree of anxiety. For this reason, even high levels of anxiety may never cause some of the weirder symptoms that can arise from anxiety and worry in certain people. If you never experience any of these strange symptoms then you may just be the type of person who can handle anxiety, or who handles it differently from people who do experience weird symptoms.
Anxiety Can Cause Weird Symptoms Sometimes
The body has a physiological response to anxiety, which can result in both physical and psychological symptoms. Remember; not everyone experiences these symptoms resulting from anxiety, even when the anxiety is profound and long lasting.
Sheer Panic
Anxiety can cause people to suddenly feel as though they have stepped outside of their own bodies. In particular, people with panic attacks caused by anxiety may feel as though they do not have control of their own bodies, which can be referred to as depersonalization. Panic attacks can also fill people with sudden and immediate feelings of impending terror or doom.
Seclusion
Some people who experience anxiety also experience agoraphobia, which makes it extremely difficult -if not impossible- to leave the house. These people are commonly confined to their homes as a result of their anxiety.
Phobias
Phobias are classified as forms of anxiety according to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-TR. A person with a phobia has too much anxiety to face certain things, some of which might be considered to be downright weird. Phobias can be about almost anything, including certain places, things, or people.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
This intriguing mental disorder falls under the category of anxiety disorders for clinical diagnosis. People with OCD may have to repeat behaviors, may be terrified of germs or contamination, or may display other symptoms that may be considered weird by most people.
Repeating History
People who experience anxiety based on a past traumatic event may find themselves reliving or re-experiencing the traumatic event repeatedly in their minds, which only proves to compound their anxiety levels. For example, a person who was brutally attacked by a dog as a child may relive the same terror every time he or she sees a dog of the same breed as an adult.
More Weird Symptoms
Here is a list of other weird symptoms people can experience as a result of anxiety:
- Feelings of tingling throughout the body
- Memory loss
- Loss of appropriate emotional responses
- Hallucinations, both auditory and visual
- The feeling of losing mental stability
- The feeling of choking or dying
Many people experience some form of discomfort with anxiety, whether it is physical or mental, but symptoms like those listed above are not normal responses to anxiety. People who experience high anxiety symptoms may fall within the criteria for an anxiety disorder diagnosis.
