How does anxiety cause so many symtoms

[pipperj]

How is it that anxiety can cause muscle pain, twitches, palpitations, headaches and soo many other things? And it can last for weeks or months when you're  not even feeling anxious?

[michigan07]

Anxiety can take a toll on the body. When you're anxious you're stressing the body out. It's not uncommon to have physical symptom associated with anxiety. Sometimes it takes a while for our body to adjust after stressfull times. For myself I can go a long time without problems and then they appear again from whatever the trigger may be. What's important is to work on and concentrate on ways to reduce it through therapy, exercise and being mindful of what you eat, drink etc.. Stay away from things like alcohol or at the very least keep intake to a minimal. Try looking at natural remedies to help and don't be over reliant on medications as they will not "cure" the problem.

[pipperj]

Oh I definitely have anxiety.  I have for years. I have panic attacks very frequently also. But I meant that I will have periods where I will be very anxious for weeks then the anxiety will fade but I will still have the tensed muscles and other symptoms.

[Paxiled]

If you're not feeling anxious then you don't have anxiety.  Anxiety is a mental condition where you feel irrationally anxious about things you're really not afraid of or are afraid of but irrationally let it bother your thinking instead of just facing the fear or deciding that's something you just don't choose to do.  The physiological effects of anxiety vary by the person and well each person takes care of themselves, their innate strength and health, etc.  What's very possible is that you have real physiological problems that have been made worse because your brain is focusing more on them because of the anxiety, or that the stress of the anxiety pushed you into overdoing things, or sleeplessness has made you weaker, etc., but the underlying problems are real.  Everyone has problems because the human body is very weak and poorly structured -- the walking upright thing that puts great stress on the back.  You can take a very strong animal, such a German Shepherd, and, through breeding related only to how they look create the modern German Shepherd that has bad hips and has a much shorter life than the original breed.  Often when you read anxiety forums people believe everything wrong with them is caused by anxiety, often because that's such an easy go-to for doctors who don't want to spend the time to find hard things that may be causing the problem, or because they really know nothing about the medications they prescribe, the food we eat, the pollution we face, our lifestyles.  Here's another example:  people on antidepressants might feel better mentally but worse physically in many of the ways you mention because these drugs interfere with magnesium absorption because magnesium is essential to having relaxed muscles.  Life's complicated, but what we do know is, the less we worry about things, the less things hurt, which doesn't mean nothing's wrong, it just means it isn't very wrong but it feels worse because we think it that way.