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Do You Have an Anxiety Disorder? 8 Early Warning Signs
Anxiety disorders don’t suddenly appear. You may experience early warning signs that feel like everyday habits or personality traits before you even consider visiting a therapist.
“Subtler signs are often overlooked because they can appear functional or socially acceptable,” says Liz Ross, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of the Coping Resource Center in Houston. Anxiety disorder symptoms are frequently misattributed to stress, personality traits, aging, or just “being busy,” Dr. Ross adds.
Everyone feels anxious sometimes. Anxiety disorders, however, involve frequent feelings of intense anxiety or panic that interfere with daily life, are difficult to manage, feel disproportionate to the risk at hand, and can last for a while. These symptoms also tend to come hand in hand with others, including persistent worry, sleep difficulties, difficulty concentrating, irritability or mood changes, physical problems like gastrointestinal discomfort, and increased fatigue. If you recognize these early signs of anxiety, speak to a mental health professional such as a psychiatrist (a medical doctor who diagnoses and treats mental health conditions) or a psychologist (who can diagnose anxiety and provide counseling), particularly if symptoms are interfering with your life or you’re turning to alcohol or drug use to cope. Anxiety is common and treatable through psychotherapy, medication, or a combination of the two.
1. Excessive Worrying
Worrying is a part of life, but excessive worry about everyday issues or repeated feelings of panic may signal an anxiety disorder.
Stress may be shifting into a diagnosable anxiety disorder when you notice certain factors, says Debra Kissen, PhD, a clinical psychologist and the founder of Light On Anxiety Treatment Centers in Chicago. These may include the following signs:
- Anxiety shows up frequently throughout the day, rather than just once in a while.
- The intensity feels harder to manage or more uncomfortable than before.
- Distress lingers even after the stressor has passed and continues over time.
- Daily life starts to feel harder, impacting factors like sleep, focus, work, and relationships.
- You spend a meaningful amount of energy thinking about anxiety, monitoring it, or trying to avoid triggers.
“Excessive worrying is very common across most anxiety disorders, and is especially central in generalized anxiety disorder,” Ross says. “It can also be present in social anxiety, health anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
2. Sleep Difficulties
Over two-thirds of Americans report losing sleep due to anxiety. Sleep and anxiety can be part of a vicious cycle in which anxiety makes it harder to sleep, and lack of sleep worsens anxiety.
“Racing thoughts and accumulated physical tension prevent the brain from settling into restorative sleep,” Dr. Kissen says. “Like driving 100 miles an hour and slamming on the brakes, the system struggles to slow down smoothly.”
Difficulty falling or staying asleep for three nights per week or more for three or more months, along with feeling sleepy during the day, may indicate clinical insomnia and warrants a conversation with a healthcare provider.
3. Difficulty Concentrating
Anxiety disorders are linked to negative effects on cognition, including attention and memory.
“An anxious brain is preoccupied with monitoring threats,” Dr. Ross says. “This can impair focus, memory, and task completion and is frequently mistaken for attention or motivation problems.”
Similarly, you may have difficulty making even low-stakes decisions, Kissen adds. Decision paralysis — when anxiety stops you from making choices due to feeling overwhelmed or fear of negative outcomes — can occur in everyday situations. For instance, you may feel overwhelmed facing too many options at the grocery store or a packed to-do list, or avoid conversations in your relationship. In moments like this, anxiety can actually change your brain chemistry by triggering the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline). This, in turn, activates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the brain’s fight-or-flight response, redirecting blood flow from the prefrontal cortex (responsible for rational decision-making) to the amygdala (responsible for emotional processing and threat detection).
The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) does the opposite of the SNS, managing the body’s rest-and-digest response. For those with anxiety and chronic stress, the SNS can become overactive and strained.
Difficulty concentrating may be a sign of anxiety when it’s associated with excessive worry more days than not for six or more months, plus other symptoms like irritability and disturbed sleep.
4. Irritability or Mood Changes
Anxiety doesn’t always feel like fear. “Chronic [sympathetic] nervous system activation can lower frustration tolerance, leading to irritability, impatience, or emotional reactivity,” Ross says.
Anxiety commonly causes hyperarousal, which is when your SNS is “on” more often than it should be. That means you’re often in fight-or-flight mode, despite not being in danger.
“This leaves little room for joy, patience, or positive emotional engagement,” Kissen says.
Similar to difficulty concentrating, mood changes may be a sign of an anxiety disorder when associated with excessive worry more days than not for six or more months, plus other symptoms like fatigue and disturbed sleep.
5. Physical Symptoms
Your brain and digestive tract have a strong, bidirectional connection. This is why anxiety can cause stomachaches and other gastrointestinal symptoms like bloating or diarrhea.
Other physical symptoms of anxiety may include headaches, nausea, muscle pain, shortness of breath, and shakiness.
“Anxiety commonly shows up in the body as part of the fight-or-flight response to perceived threats,” Ross says. Your body may also have a “freeze” response (becoming immobilized due to a threat) or “fawn” response (people-pleasing, submission, or otherwise appeasing the source of danger) to stress.
Physical symptoms are common across most anxiety disorders, Ross adds. “They are more pronounced in panic disorder and health anxiety, but issues such as muscle tension and stomach issues are widespread,” she says.
6. Avoidant Behaviors
Avoiding routine activities is one of the clearest indicators that anxiety is becoming problematic, Ross says.
For example, someone who has social anxiety disorder — a specific type of anxiety in which a person fears judgment by others — may find activities like eating in front of others, meeting new people, or even using a public bathroom daunting. Sometimes, those with this type of fear avoid spaces and events like restaurants and social gatherings altogether.
Avoidance temporarily reduces anxiety, but actually makes matters worse in the long-run, Kissen says.
Life gradually becomes smaller as you take part in fewer activities to avoid discomfort, Kissen adds. You may also experience emotional numbness or detachment, meaning that your emotions feel muted, or you have difficulty experiencing them at all. This is often your brain trying to protect you from overwhelm and stress, but it can also be a side effect of some medications, including certain antidepressants.
Avoidant behaviors are a core feature in social anxiety, agoraphobia, other specific phobias, and panic disorder, Ross adds. They are also present but sometimes subtler in GAD.
7. Perfectionism or Over-Functioning
Perfectionism isn’t always “just a personality trait.” One meta-analysis of 121 studies out of Australia found that young people ages 6 to 24 who reported higher levels of perfectionist traits were more likely to experience anxiety than their peers.
“Some individuals manage anxiety by over-preparing, overplanning, or holding themselves to rigid standards,” Ross says. “While this may look productive, it is often driven by fear of making mistakes or losing control rather than by genuine motivation.”
This can also take the form of a growing need for certainty or control, including distress when plans change or difficulty accepting ambiguity, Ross adds. Perfectionism or over-functioning is common in people with GAD and social anxiety, and high-achieving individuals use over-preparation to manage fear of mistakes or judgment.
Perfectionism becomes problematic and may be a sign of anxiety if you tie your self-worth to perfect performance or worry excessively about mistakes.
8. Intense Fatigue
One Australian study of 32 women with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and 32 non-anxious women found that those with GAD reported higher levels of both physical and mental fatigue than women without it. GAD, the most common type of anxiety disorder, involves ongoing, excessive worry (including about routine, everyday issues) that is out-of-proportion to the actual circumstance and affects your functionality and how you feel physically.
“Constant vigilance, mental monitoring, and muscle tension are exhausting,” Kissen says. “Anxiety drains energy reserves, leaving the nervous system with a depleted battery.”
You should talk to a doctor if getting enough sleep, managing stress, eating well, and drinking ample fluids for two or more weeks don’t ease your fatigue.
The Takeaway
- Early warning signs of anxiety can include issues like excessive worry, irritability and other mood changes, disturbed sleep, or gastrointestinal distress.
- Other early signs that may be less commonly associated with anxiety include difficulty concentrating, perfectionism, intense fatigue, or avoiding certain situations.
- If you suspect you have an anxiety disorder, talk to your doctor or a mental health professional like a psychiatrist or psychologist — anxiety and anxiety disorders are common and treatable through therapy, medications, or both.
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