Anxiety has become inescapable, and it’s not just because of the government. Anxiety disorders including phobias, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder are the most common mental illnesses in the country, affecting 18 percent of the adult population.
While most symptoms of anxiety—anger issues, appetite loss, fatigue—are easier to identify, many effects seem unrelated. Even phenomena as weird as ear pain and vocal changes can be culprits of anxiety. If something weird is going on with your body, the answer might be in your mind.
1. Forgetfulness
Anxious people are distracted, or, rather, so preoccupied with fear of an impending disaster that we’re less likely to concentrate and absorb less information. A 2016 study found that mice exposed to repeated stress experienced swelling in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that transfers information from short-term memory to long-term memory. Ironically, worrying about anxiety-based memory loss will exacerbate forgetfulness.
2. Earaches
Stress and tension cause the throat to constrict. Because your throat and ears are connected, pain in the former often reverberates in the latter. If you experience persistent or sporadic ear pain, monitor possible influences. Ear pain from riding in an airplane, for example, has a different origin than earaches that flare up in stressful situations.
3. Constipation
Although the relationship between the brain and digestive system is widely known, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting are more commonly associated with anxiety. However, there are lots of ways your digestive flow can be disturbed, and anxiety is prevalent in chronically constipated patients. Alternatively, many anti-anxiety medications double as muscle relaxants, and your intestines, which are a huge tangle of muscles, can take longer to do their job and impede your digestive flow.