Did you know that anxiety is a response from our body to adapt to the different and fascinating challenges of life? Without it, we would probably do terribly in high school exams, we would rarely be told “You start on Monday” after a job interview and we would rarely make it to that glorious second date. This response from the nervous system is more than necessary for you to be successful in living in society, the only healthy way that, at least until today, is known to carry on with your existence.

The problem begins to develop when the stimulus exceeds your ability to adapt. Therefore, what is generated is exactly the opposite of the purpose for which anxiety exists. That is, you react in a non-adaptive way and your life begins to fall apart.

Have you ever pushed the motor of an appliance until, before your astonished gaze, it simply burned out and stopped working? Well, we could say that your household appliance suffered an acute anxiety attack and could no longer respond.

So, do I have it or don’t I? Find out below how to read yourself through these useful techniques that will help you truthfully answer the question: How do I know if I have anxiety?

Answer the question how do I know if I have anxiety? By detecting the unequivocal signs

Our body is very intelligent. So it knows very well how to ask us for help when an illness puts it in jeopardy. However, anxiety has a very peculiar characteristic: it speeds us up so much and diverts our attention in such a masterful way that it finally manages to slip away and go unnoticed.

Therefore, the question how do I know if I have anxiety? Is not so easy to answer if you do not know the unequivocal signs that reveal it, which are divided into physiological, cognitive, and emotional.

Physiological signs of anxiety

• Appetite disorders
• Weight loss or gain
• Excessive and unjustified sweating
• Tremors
• Acceleration of heart rate
• Self-destructive behaviors (nail biting, hair pulling, burning, cutting)
• Headaches 
• Digestive disorders
• Gastritis
• Stomach ulcer

How do I know if I have anxiety in my body? Some of the signs you will receive can be confusing, since who hasn’t had a lack or excess of appetite? Who doesn’t have sweaty hands or foreheads when faced with an embarrassing or challenging situation? Who hasn’t suffered from stomach pain?

However, what is very clear is that no one suffers from five or more of these symptoms for a prolonged period and without specific reasons, such as having to take an exam or being in the middle of a period of restructuring at work, without justification.

Therefore, if these symptoms corner you and you cannot find the reason, it is because you have anxiety.   

Cognitive signs of anxiety

• Difficulty concentrating
• Decreased academic performance
• Reduction in productivity
• Exaggerated and unrealistic worries about everyday matters
• Difficulty or impossibility of making decisions
• Sadness without reason
• Catastrophic thoughts
• Emergence of dichotomous thinking (always, everything, never and nothing)
• Disappearance of nuances: everything becomes black or white
• Selective abstraction
• Taking everything personally (you end up believing that you are the center of attention, but in a negative way)
• Predicting the future, but we always predict negative events about ourselves.

Among the cognitive signals that answer the question “How do I know if I have anxiety ?” are selective abstraction, personalization, and prediction of the future, a very bleak future to be more precise.

Selective abstraction is about seeing the glass half empty, to which we add the negative interpretation of the glass half full. As we all know, happiness is not complete. And this is not a cliché, but a realistic conception of life. There is always a percentage of events that do not turn out as we expect. It is here that selective abstraction finds very fertile ground for development.

Imagine your dream wedding party; everything has gone as you expected, however, at the last minute your best friend gets a call, apologizes to you, and leaves. If you didn’t have an anxiety disorder that leads to selective withdrawal, you would worry about her. Instead, in this case, you think she planned to leave your party because she never wanted to be there. See? The world is becoming too catastrophic for you, and you don’t deserve to live like that.

As for personalization, what happens to you is that you come to believe that the world revolves around you, not to improve your life, but to make it worse. When it comes to predictions of the future, these always represent the most devastating scenarios.

Emotional signs of anxiety

• Irritability
• Mood swings
• Frustration
• Apathy
• Distress
• Fears
• Phobias

If you thought anxiety was the worst thing that could happen to you, look at what emotional dependency could do—and undo—in your life.

With our team of psychologists, you will find the right therapy to finally say goodbye to anxiety. Here we have professionals specialized in the subject. Contact us today and give your quality of life a second chance.