What Anxiety Does to Your Body

Enter big, bad 2021. These are exceedingly anxious times due to the unholy combination of economic precariousness, social unrest, political volatility, environmental catastrophes (pause: deep breath) and the COVID-19 pandemic. But an individualised, holistic approach to managing anxiety—including lifestyle tweaks, medication, mindfulness exercises and, to begin with, acceptance—will ensure it doesn’t rule your life.

Anxiety is part of your body’s stressresponse system—and it’s uncomfortable, overwhelming and sometimes plain confusing.

“I describe anxiety as a futureoriented emotional response to a perceived threat,” says Dr Joel

Minden, a clinical psychologist and the author of Show Your Anxiety

Who’s Boss. “We anticipate that something bad will happen. Maybe we have evidence for thinking that. Maybe we don’t. But we have a belief that something catastrophic might occur.”

Almost immediately after that, Minden says, your sympathetic nervous system, which controls involuntary processes like breathing and heart rate, kicks into high gear. This leads your adrenal glands to release adrenalin and cortisol, two of the crucial hormones driving your body’s fight-freeze-or-flight response, which prompt anxiety’s physical symptoms. Your heart races, your blood pressure rises, your pupils dilate, you get short of breath and you break out into clammy sweats.

Meanwhile, cortisol curbs functions that your brain considers nonessential: it alters immunesystem responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes. This was perhaps helpful for our ancestors trying to outrun a sabre-toothed tiger, but not so much when you simply walk past someone in a supermarket and, even though you’re both wearing masks, can’t stop ruminating for days afterward about whether you might have caught COVID-19 when they coughed.

“The physiological sensations you get make sense when you’re in danger,” says Dr Melisa Robichaud, a psychologist and clinical instructor in the University of British Columbia’s psychiatry department. “But they feel odd and sometimes quite scary when there’s no physical threat.”