Women and Anxiety: Common Anxiety Symptoms in Women

Data from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), about 18.1% of adults in the U.S. experience some kind of anxiety disorder. That works out to around 40 million people. It’s thought that the actual figure could be much higher, however, when you take into consideration misdiagnosis errors by clinicians and all the people who never seek help for their anxiety. Up to 30% of Americans in the U.S. could actually be affected by the symptoms of an anxiety disorder.

These figures are really quite alarming in themselves. Further research done by Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA) has revealed that during the past ten years, more than 54% of people with recognized anxiety disorders are women, and a little less than 46% are men. Anxiety is a huge issue for Americans in general, but more women are struggling to cope with these symptoms than men.

What is an Anxiety Disorder?

A popular saying from eastern philosophy is that “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the moment.” It’s not known for certain who said this, but it’s been attributed to Lao Tzu. Regardless of its attribution, this quote has a lot of wisdom packed into three short sentences.

Psychiatry has taught us that there is a multitude of possible causes for depression and anxiety, including biological factors, and yet our thoughts have a significant impact on our mood.

It’s not too much of a stretch to see that if our thoughts are constantly on the past (whether lamenting something that has been lost or ruminating on past mistakes) or the future (perhaps wrestling with worries of what’s to come or battling a sense of hopelessness) these thoughts affect how we feel. When we’re focused on the past or the future, it can be hard to enjoy the present moment.

What, then, is anxiety? Anxiety is the feelings that emerge when we begin to worry about things that have yet to happen – or may not even happen. There’s often a lot of confusion about fear vs. anxiety, however. They are not the same thing, but they do go hand-in-hand. Fear is both emotional and physiological. It happens in response to a real and imminent threat to you or someone you’re attached to. Anxiety, however, is a response to a perceived threat.

Here’s an example that may make the distinction clearer. Imagine that you are sitting in your office, working away at your computer, when all of a sudden, a huge grizzly bear comes hurtling through the door, heading straight for you. In this situation, fear would be the natural, immediate response.

Fear is an emotion that conveys the message that we’re in danger. Human beings would not have survived without our natural fear response to threats. It’s actually a useful emotion. It drives us into action so that we can protect ourselves and those around us.

Faced with a grizzly bear charging right at us, our body is going to launch right into survival mode and this can be to fight the bear, run away from the bear (flight), or freeze (and hope the bear leaves us alone because we’re not a threat to it). People are different in the way they respond to threats. There’s no one universal fear response, no right or wrong way to react when the grizzly bear comes charging at you!

The way that God has so masterfully engineered our bodies, there’s a lot going on inside when the fear response is triggered. Immediately once we recognize the threat, our heart rate will speed up, to around 100 beats per minute or more. Our bodies will send adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine coursing through our parasympathetic nervous system, too. This is what prepares us for fight, flight or freeze responses.

One interesting result of these automatic reactions is that when our brain gets the message that we’re in survival mode, parts of the prefrontal cortex will reduce activity because they’re not needed in this state.

For example, when confronted with an angry bear, we don’t need to use logic to figure out the statistical chances of winning a fight against it, or our chances of survival if we jump out of a third-floor window. We certainly don’t need to use our prefrontal cortex’s ability to empathies with the bear. Sure, he’s hungry because there’s a salmon shortage, but empathy and compassion will only make us his next meal.

What we need when we’re being attacked is the ability to think quickly, creatively and non-judgmentally. If we’re about to face down a grizzly bear, that makes sense, right? The problem is that the likelihood of a grizzly bear attacking you in your office is pretty slim.

Our distant ancestors may have faced down bears, but the modern world is very different. This means that now, in our high-flying, success-focused, deadline-centric society, we find ourselves reacting to grizzly bear attacks in everyday lives when they’re certainly not happening.

Imagine that you’re sitting at your desk, working at your computer, and everything is perfectly normal – no grizzly bears, no danger, no reason for a fear response. Suddenly, as you glance at your schedule for the next month, your heart begins to race at over 100 beats per minute and your body is flooded with adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine as if the grizzly bear is headed straight for you. There is no grizzly bear, but your body is reacting as if there were.

You can probably relate quite easily to this scenario. Our bodies were engineered for the flight-fight-freeze response, and these responses happen in all kinds of situations that aren’t really survival situations. Conflict with a family member or colleague, or being overwhelmed by corporate pressure, can cause the survival response when you become emotionally flooded.

The difference between a grizzly bear attack and these other situations that cause the same reaction is that while you don’t need logic and reason to survive a bear attack, in the other situations logic and reason are necessary. Your prefrontal cortex is impaired when you actually need it.

Resolving relational conflict needs empathy, logic and so on. When you’re in a situation that isn’t life or death, but your body is responding to a grizzly bear attack, this is anxiety rather than fear. You’re perceiving a threat that isn’t a danger to your survival.

When you’re experiencing anxiety, it feels very much like it does when you’re under attack from a grizzly bear. The same fight, flight or freeze responses happen. It’s the situation that’s different. The danger isn’t the same. It can be a truly awful experience, however, despite the threat not being literally life or death.

Can you remember a time when you were in actual danger? Perhaps you were in a road accident, attack or natural disaster. If you can, you’ll probably remember that afterward, you experienced physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. When our bodies go into survival mode, exhaustion almost always follows once the danger has passed. There needs to be a recovery period, and that takes time – often days, in fact.

Because anxiety results in the same parasympathetic nervous system responses as occur when there’s a real grizzly bear charging at us, it’s not unusual for the same types of exhaustion to follow anxiety attacks.

If you regularly experience anxiety, you may find that you’re constantly battling feelings of exhaustion, wanting to sleep all day and feeling emotionally spent. The problem with this, of course, is that real life-or-death, grizzly bear type threats are things that happen only occasionally, not on a constant basis as with chronic anxiety.

Anxiety Symptoms in Women

Symptoms of anxiety in both men and women are generally quite similar. However, Robert Levenson, Ph.D., Dolf Zillman, Ph.D., and John Gottman, Ph.D., (The Gottman Institute) have discovered is that women are able to calm down more quickly than men, due to biological differences between the genders. Women’s bodies don’t need as much time to recover from cardiovascular stress.

This means that women who practice deep-breathing exercises to re-oxygenate the bloodstream are able to slow their heart rate down more rapidly than men are able to. Unfortunately, when we lead busy lives, we rarely pause to take full, deep breaths even when we’re not experiencing anxiety. Our breathing patterns tend to be short and quick – enough to get us from one task to the next.

Modern society is at a disadvantage because of our fast-paced lives. If we’re not taking deep breaths when we’re going about ordinary life, we’re putting ourselves more at risk for anxiety. Research has proved that deep breathing and mindfulness practices such as shifting focus to the present moment are powerful antidotes to anxiety. We’re missing out on the most natural anxiety medication because of our lifestyles.

What’s more, our breathing and thinking patterns actually make us prone to anxiety. We fail to take the time to look at how we can solve problems in the present moment because we’re generally so focused on worrying about problems in the future. Dr. Tony Evans famously said that “worrying is like paying interest on trouble before it is due.”

Common Signs of Anxiety in Women

If you think you may be experiencing anxiety but aren’t quite certain, here’s a list of the most common anxiety symptoms in women:

• Headaches
• Pain or tension in your muscles
• Disturbed sleep
• Tightness in your head, neck, face, and jaw
• Pains in your chest
• Pulsing or ringing in your ears
• Sweating excessively
• Trembling and/or shaking
• Feeling unusually hot or cold
• Rapid heart rate
• Numbness and/or tingling
• A sense of depersonalization or derealization (not feeling /not knowing who you are)
• Feeling nauseous and having an upset stomach
• Finding it hard to breathe
• Feeling like you’re going mad
• Feeling dizzy or like you’re going to faint

If you’re finding that the symptoms of anxiety are affecting your life considerably or affecting your ability to function, it’s a good idea to seek the help of a Christian counselor who can help you manage your symptoms and give you tools to cope. These tools might include techniques to focus on the moment, deep breathing, and managing intrusive thoughts.

When you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ it can help to understand that he never wants you to be consumed by worry about tomorrow – he wants you to live in and enjoy the present.

I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… and why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or toil. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. – Matthew 6:25-34.

This passage of Scripture seems like it’s been written especially for people struggling with anxiety. When you think carefully about Jesus’ words here, it makes a lot of sense. Birds don’t wake up every morning consumed by anxiety about how long it’s going to take them to finish building their nest. Nor do they panic about finding worms to eat.

Instead, the birds wake up every morning knowing with absolute certainty that they will find food, supplies and everything else they need for the day. The truth is that human beings are more important and valuable to God than birds and coming to a full understanding of this truth can be vital for dealing with the impact that anxiety has on your life.

God promises to feed, clothe, and shelter animals and plants across the earth. They’re not made in His image the way that we are, and He cares so much for them! How much more, then, does He care about meeting all of the needs of His children?

We do not need to be weighed down by anxiety when we have a loving Father who can provide us with more than we can ever ask or imagine. Of course, when you’re in the grip of anxiety it can be hard to remember that, but with the help of a Christian counselor, you can begin to internalize these truths and replace anxiety with a sense of peace instead.