These 10 tips can help. Anxiety can sometimes manifest as a need to get everything just right. A tendency toward perfectionism often stems from underlying worries about making mistakes and experiencing criticism or rejection as a result. Perfection is pretty difficult to achieve, though, so you might find this goal only adds more stress, in the end.
Anxiety can involve vague feelings of danger or doom rather than specific fears. Experts describe defensive pessimism as a strategy to better manage daily anxiety. Instead of looking toward the future with hope and optimism, you might carefully consider everything that could go wrong so you can create a backup plan, just in case.
For some people, anxiety proves more physical than anything else. Commonly recognized physical signs of anxiety include a nervous stomach , sweaty hands, or a pounding heart. Appetite and sleep loss can also leave you feeling drained, exhausted, and without the energy or motivation to explore these symptoms further. A panic attack involves intense but short-lived feelings of anxiety and fear that seemingly arise from nowhere, often without any specific cause. If you have regular or repeated panic attacks, however, you could have panic disorder.
This anxiety condition also involves worries about having more panic attacks. If you regularly struggle to get enough sleep and also notice some feelings of worry or uneasiness during the day, you could have a sleep disorder.
Sleep deprivation can have a pretty big impact on both physical and mental health. It can also produce symptoms that resemble anxiety symptoms, including:. Persistent sadness and low mood commonly characterize depression, but not everyone who has depression feels sad.
In fact, depression often involves many of the same symptoms as anxiety, including:. Depression and anxiety commonly occur together , so a therapist can offer support with identifying symptoms and finding the most helpful treatment. Both conditions can involve:. ADHD typically involves more restlessness, distractibility, and difficulty concentrating. Since these symptoms can prompt feelings of nervousness and unease, you might find it challenging to recognize the difference — particularly if you have both ADHD and anxiety, which many people do.
Nobody would ever believe something was wrong, because you always portrayed yourself as being fine. If these characteristics sound familiar, here's a look at what you might experience or what others might observe of you if you have high functioning anxiety.
The potential benefits of high functioning anxiety can be seen in the outcomes and successes that you and other people observe. On the surface, you may appear very successful in work and life. This may be objectively true if you only evaluate yourself based on what you achieve. Characteristics of people with high functioning anxiety that are often thought of as positive include:.
In the case of high functioning anxiety, a struggle often lies beneath that veil of success. Characteristics of high functioning anxiety can be perceived by others as being "cute" or just part of your personality.
In reality, these attributes are driven by underlying anxiety. Other characteristics of high functioning anxiety are internal and may never be noticed by others—despite the fact that they cause you a great deal of stress. People don't know always know that these actions are caused by anxiety and they may view them as being part of you who are.
Despite being regarded as "high functioning," you may experience the following struggles in your day to day life. A high-functioning person is often regarded as an overachiever. If you asked most people who know you, they probably would not have a clue that you struggle with anxiety every day. Perhaps you are able to achieve essential tasks such as those relating to work and housekeeping , but feel your life is limited in other ways for example, you never do anything outside your comfort zone.
Your actions are probably dictated by your anxiety. You likely choose activities that calm your racing thoughts rather than pursuing activities because you would enjoy them , or because they would expand your horizons. If you have high functioning anxiety, you've likely become adept at presenting a false persona to the world and never show your true feelings to anyone.
Instead, you keep it all bottled up inside and compartmentalize your feelings with a plan to deal with them later but later never comes.
There is help out there for people who are dealing with any form of anxiety, including high functioning forms. However, certain characteristics of high functioning anxiety may have prevented you from seeking help. Some possible reasons you might not have sought help for high functioning anxiety include:. For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database. Many people have a specific image or idea of what it means to have an anxiety diagnosis.
For example, you might envision a person who is housebound, cannot work, or who struggles to maintain relationships of any kind. We don't often think of the inner turmoil of anxiety as an internal struggle as being reason enough to seek help. Anxiety can be very much a life of denial. You might even convince yourself that there is nothing wrong—you're just a workaholic, germaphobe , list-maker, etc. It would be more helpful for us to refer to "high functioning anxiety" as simply anxiety.
While it can look and feel different from other types of anxiety, it's still present even though it's well-hidden and can seriously disrupt a person's life. When you feel isolated and alone, it's harder to reach out to others. As more people talk about and identify with having "high functioning" anxiety, it may become easier for people to seek help. Thinking of anxiety in both its positive and negative terms may help to reduce stigma.
Rather than view anxiety as being a weakness, reducing stigma has allowed society to highlight when people with anxiety are able to live full and productive lives. When trying to raise awareness of a social issue like mental illness, it can be helpful to identify well-known or famous people as examples. Stars such as Barbra Streisand and Donny Osmond, and athletes like Zack Greinke and Ricky Williams, have all been forthcoming about their experiences with high functioning anxiety.
Scott Stossel, the national editor of The Atlantic, has written extensively about his experiences with anxiety in the context of his achievements. There is little research on the topic of high functioning anxiety, but we do know that there is an optimal level of anxiety not too low or too high that fuels performance the Yerkes-Dodson Law. Anxiety usually has a trigger—an event or thought that provokes an anxious response.
Our anxiety, or fear, evolved as an alarm bell to move us into life-saving action. Add this to the fact that anxiety can also cause confusion or disassociation, and you can see why the exact causes of your anxiety are often so hard to pin down.
Especially if one or more symptoms cause you a lot of distress and worry, you should seek treatment before your symptoms get worse. Most mental health disorders exist on a spectrum. For some people, symptoms are less severe and respond well to outpatient treatment. But how do you know when your anxiety is severe and lasting enough to qualify as an actual disorder?
Your anxiety may qualify as a disorder if any of the following symptoms occur:. You are doing the right thing by getting help with your anxiety. And one day soon, your courage will pay off when you begin to overcome your anxiety and start feeling more in control of your life. Residential treatment is an excellent way to get the care you need for your anxiety, both in terms of healing its causes and learning how to cope with the disorder.
There are many different anxiety disorders, and a good residential program will begin with an initial evaluation and an accurate diagnosis, which is key to sustainable recovery. They will give you comprehensive treatment—not just for your anxiety, but any co-occurring disorders that may be present. Residential clinicians will delve into the root causes and triggers of your anxiety, and zero in on the areas where healing work must be done. That means if you have a panic attack at any time, day or night, there will be someone there to support you through it.
In short, a residential treatment facility is a soothing, safe place to heal where you can build up your confidence and learn the coping mechanisms necessary to manage and live beyond the boundaries set by your anxiety. People like Laura recover from anxiety every day. Her recovery is also proof of how you too can heal from the endless burden of anxiety. Her story shows that people can move past their anxiety and go on to lead full, and happy lives. Reliving a disturbing or traumatic event—a violent encounter, the sudden death of a loved one—is a hallmark symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD , which shares some features with anxiety disorders.
Until very recently, in fact, PTSD was seen as a type of anxiety disorder rather than a stand-alone condition. But flashbacks may occur with other types of anxiety as well.
Some research, including a study in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders , suggests that some people with social anxiety have PTSD-like flashbacks of experiences that might not seem obviously traumatic, such as being publicly ridiculed. These people may even avoid reminders of the experience—another symptom reminiscent of PTSD. The obsessive mindset known as perfectionism "goes hand-in-hand with anxiety disorders," Winston says.
Perfectionism is especially common in obsessive-compulsive disorder OCD , which, like PTSD, had long been viewed as an anxiety disorder. In order to be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a person's obsessiveness and intrusive thoughts must be accompanied by compulsive behavior, whether it's mental telling yourself It'll be all right over and over again or physical hand-washing, straightening items.
Obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior become a full-blown disorder when the need to complete the behaviors—also known as "rituals"—begins to drive your life, Winston says. Persistent self-doubt and second-guessing is a common feature of anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder and OCD.
In some cases, the doubt may revolve around a question that's central to a person's identity or relationships, like "Do I love my husband as much as he loves me? With OCD, Winston says, these "doubt attacks" are especially common when a question is unanswerable. To get our top stories delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Healthy Living newsletter.
Save Pin More. The symptoms of anxiety can be hard to detect. Here are the ones you need to pay attention to, and how to know if you may have an anxiety disorder.
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