Anxiety is a mental health disorder. But it also causes a wide range of physical symptoms. Most of us have an understanding that when we’re anxious, we expect to feel sweaty, have a rapid heartbeat, feel light headed, and more. If you have panic attacks, this is even more pronounced, with chest pains, muscle weakness, and a wide variety of other symptoms.
Many of these symptoms, specially for those that have anxiety attacks, are caused not directly by anxiety itself but by the hyperventilation that anxiety triggers. Anxiety makes you breathe faster. As you breathe faster and more shallow (meaning, less full breaths). Typically, you breathe in, your body takes the oxygen and starts converting it to carbon dioxide, and then you expel it.
But when you hyperventilate, this causes you to expel more CO2 before your body has a chance to create more of it. Your body needs CO2 to operate efficiently, and when it doesn’t have that, your heart beats harder, you feel more lightheaded, and your anxiety symptoms get significantly worse.
Now, the most important takeaway of this is that the primary cause is too much oxygen and too little carbon dioxide, because your body isn’t creating it fast enough to account for how quickly you’re breathing it out.
But hyperventilation also causes one confusing symptom that can make anxiety much worse.
It also causes a feeling as though you’re not getting enough *oxygen*.
When you hyperventilate, you feel like you’re not breathing enough – like you’re not getting enough air. As a result, you either breathe faster or try to breathe bigger (like yawning) to try to get more oxygen in your system.
The result?
You make hyperventilation worse, which in turn makes your anxiety symptoms worse. One of the reasons that panic attacks can be so severe is that, during the attack, a person is typically trying as hard as they can to get more air all while they need to try to make more carbon dioxide. The symptoms get progressively more severe until they peak.
How to Address This Confusing Symptom
Psychotherapy is the best way to address anxiety and panic disorder, but a part of the psychotherapy process is education. The more you know and understand about panic disorder and its symptoms, the easier it becomes to try to prevent more significant attacks.
This is why part of treatment is education, and in this case, educating you specifically on this symptom – the idea that you are going to need to fight the urge to take deeper breaths, and instead remember to slow down your breathing (and even hold your breath!) could help reduce the severity of your symptoms dramatically.
Now, slowing down your breathing is unlikely to stop a panic attack that has already started. But the less severe your symptoms, the easier it becomes to feel emboldened to treat your panic attacks and anxiety. At Flourish Psychology, we want to be there for those that are struggling and help them with the next steps of bringing their anxiety under control. If you need help for yourself or a loved one, please reach out to our team, today.
Human beings are social animals. We need and crave connection with others, and benefit from feeling this connection on a deep level. It’s known in the world of psychology as “social support,” and it’s directly connected to us living longer and happier lives. The simple act of feeling closely connected to others can add years to your lifespan.
That social support can also be a tool that can be used to address psychological challenges, including some that are directly connected to the development of social support, such as social anxiety. As a result, it can be useful for people struggling with anxiety to deeply embrace their friendships, and use that as a way to help them overcome their mental health issues.
NOTE: Of course, one of the challenges of having social anxiety is that it can make it difficult to find and maintain friendships. We’ll address that later. But many people with social anxiety do have *some* friends, maybe one or two. We’re going to talk more about the benefits of maintaining those friendships, before discussing alternative steps.
About Friends and Confidence
One of the most powerful tools that we have to feel more confident around others is a deeper feeling of friendship with the individuals that are currently with us.
When we feel as though we have a few very deep, fulfilling, arguably unbreakable friendships, we tend to experience:
Less concern about the opinion of others. When we have issues like social anxiety and public speaking anxiety, we have a tendency to worry about what strangers think and that it might affect our social standing. But if we feel much more confident that we have deep friendships waiting for us, the anxiety that any mistakes will hurt us goes down.
More confident in ourselves. Many studies have shown that we have much more confidence when we have friendships that are truly fulfilling, and that confidence can and will seep into our components of our life, including how we interact with others.
Further social experiences in a stress free setting. It can be hard to talk to strangers. It can be hard to be in crowds. But social experiences are still social experiences. When you have some deep friendships that are really fulfilling, you are less likely to feel concerned about speaking to those individuals. As a result, you have more conversations, learn more social skills, and learn more about yourself – all of which are beneficial for addressing anxiety in other ways.
It gives you people that can introduce you to others and support you while you’re there. Social experiences beget more social experiences. You are more likely to meet more people through your friendships, and also have someone that can go with you to social events to help ease your anxiety while you’re there.
Sometimes, too, when we feel a lot of social anxiety a part of us actually separates ourselves from our close friends because we desire the experience of not having anxiety and of socializing with new people. In a way, it’s as though our anxiety makes us want what we are struggling to have.
But you may want to consider re-embracing those close friendships and building on them. The effects that it can have on your social anxiety – and your personal life – can be fairly pronounced. If you’re looking for something you can do to feel less anxious with public speaking and in social settings, reconnecting and building on your existing friendships can help.
Of course, for some people their anxiety is so severe, they struggle to have these friendships, or they often rethink them and worry that their friends may not truly like them. In these situations, you can try a few things.
First, voice your experience with those friends. Let them know, calmly when you’re not feeling high emotion, that you struggle with this and you are working on it, and want to know if they’re willing to work with you as well. Sometimes that reassurance can be of big benefit. In addition, there are many groups that exist to help you find individual friendships in a less tense setting. Trying to connect with smaller groups can be a good step towards addressing this anxiousness.
Of course, you may find that you still struggle – either you still have social anxiety despite deep friendships with others, or your anxiety is so strong you are struggling to make deep friendships at all. In those types of situations, reaching out to a therapist can help. Find out more about our therapy and mental health services for anxiety at Flourish Psychology.
So often, when we talk about various mental health symptoms, we gloss over them without explaining the process that causes them to occur. For example, one of the most common symptoms of anxiety and depression are “irritability.” People that have depression are more irritable with their family and friends than those that are not.
But why is this?
If you want to read a long science article about it from the NIH, you can do so here. But if you prefer to understand it in a more simplified way, let’s talk about the possible causes.
More Than One Trigger
As with many mental health issues, the actual causes can be complex. Possible connections include, but are not limited to:
Limited Stress Coping
When you’re struggling with depression, you’re already experiencing difficulty coping with stress. If you imagine that you have a limit on how much stress you can cope with at any given time, it’s easy to imagine that normal life interactions become more difficult to handle overall, which in turn makes you more irritable.
Poor Sleep
Depression leads to poor sleep, and poor sleep leads to a decrease in positive emotions and an increase in negative ones. As you sleep less, you become more likely to feel generally irritable, which in turn leads to feelings of irritability. The same issues can occur if depression affects your diet.
Reduced Pleasure
Typically, we need to be able to experience positive feelings in order to avoid negative ones. But when we have depression, we may not be able to experience pleasure. It’s a condition known as “anhedonia.” If you can’t experience positive emotions, often all that is left is the experience of negative ones.
Projection
When we experience anger on the inside, where we feel negative about ourselves, we can sometimes project that anger outwards. You’re already feeling angry about yourself, so your immediate emotion when faced with challenges is anger.
Other Thoughts on Irritability and Depression
It should also be noted that, while anyone with depression can be irritable, irritability as a symptom is more common in children and teens. Why might this be? Perhaps because they haven’t learned other coping habits, or emotional regulation, so it may come out as irritability.
In addition, it’s important to remember that mental health issues affect our neurotransmitters, which change the way we think. It may turn some thoughts into more irritable ones, which in turn delivers an irritable response.
Regardless of the cause, irritability can be a symptom of depression, and in turn would benefit from a depression treatment. Find out more by contacting Flourish Psychology, today.
Anxiety is complex. It is not something that happens overnight, nor is it something that necessary has a single cause. Trauma can cause anxiety. So can chronic stress. Genetics can also play a role. But many people do not realize that anxiety can be caused by a variety of factors, contributing to its development and maintenance.
Let’s talk about some examples:
Anxiety Can Be Caused by Your Breathing
We touched on this in the past, when we wrote about how undeveloped back muscles can contribute to anxiety, but it is worth reiterating here. How you breathe can not only make anxiety symptoms worse, but actually create anxiety itself.
When you breathe in a shallow way, you stress out your body and your brain. You feel worse, make your stress worse, and create a scenario where you are more prone to experiencing anxiety symptoms.
Now, anxiety and stress can cause you to breathe poorly. But so can issues like bad posture. We also breathe worse when we’re leaning over on our phones, and we breathe worse when we spend time reading about stressful things (like the news), causing temporary stress/anxiety that can lead to more significant anxiety disorders down the road.
Anxiety Can Be Caused by Scrolling
Most people are loosely aware, or have heard about, the effects that social media can have on your mental health. Many people develop eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem from issues related to what they see on social media caused by comparisons, jealousy, and so much more.
But what you may not be aware of is that the simple act of scrolling social media – literally just watching videos or looking at photos – can cause anxiety.
The reason is due to something called “digital overload.” We touched on this in a post directed at influencers, but what many people do not realize is that their brains are simply not equipped to process that much information at once. When you scroll something like TikTok or Facebook, you are essentially viewing thousands of unrelated videos and faces, along with jokes, scenery, and more all in moments.
You may feel like it’s no big deal. After all, you view videos all the time and you do not *feel* stressed. But, as you watch these videos, your brain is trying to process everything and becoming overloaded. You may feel calm and relaxed while scrolling, but your brain is stressed. Over time, that stress can lead to the development of anxiety disorders, or make an anxiety disorder worse.
Clutter
Digital overload is an example of what happens to our brains when there is simply too much stimulation as a direct result of viewing countless videos. But while it’s not quite as severe, this type of thing can occur in the offline world as well.
Clutter can be an example of this. Though it does not affect everyone the same way, and thus is not going to trigger anxiety for everyone, there are many people that find that the act of being surrounded by clutter can cause them stress, and ultimately anxiety.
Part of the reason for this is still related to this idea of overload. When there is “stuff” all over a house, then the whole house has stimulation that can make you uncomfortable, stressed, and anxious. But beyond that, one of the effects of clutter is that it reminds you that you have a lot to do. Your home is no longer relaxing, but instead another reminder of stresses. If you already experience things like work stress, then clutter is expected to make that worse.
The Complexity of Anxiety and the Clarity of Treatment
All of these are examples of challenges that can lead to anxiety. But the thing about anxiety is that it’s not typically “cured” by simply removing these issues. Exercising your back muscles isn’t going to suddenly cure you even if you start breathing well again. Once anxiety has developed, it is still anxiety, and will benefit from therapy and mental health support.
Still, it is helpful to know these other potential contributors. Many people, when they have anxiety, try to think back and imagine what the cause might have been. Sometimes, we find a clear cause. Other times, it’s a combination of issues – including the strange examples above – that create anxiety symptoms.
Rather than overthink the cause, what is most important is seeking treatment. If you need help with your anxiety, reach out to Flourish Psychology, today.
2025 is around the corner, and now is as important a time as any to remind everyone that, while you do not need to have any New Year’s Resolutions, it is still important to use these new year milestones to remind yourself that it’s okay to care about yourself and your wellbeing.
One story that we hear often around this time that relates to this is relief when plans are canceled. Many people say, casually, that they are stressed about some upcoming social experience. Suddenly they get a text that the event is canceled, and instead of feeling sad that they won’t see their friends or family, they experience relief that they will not have to attend.
This relief can often lead to guilt. It may even be a source of humor – something that you joke about with others. But it also shows how important it is that we start prioritizing your mental health above all else.
We Have Too Much Going On
Many of us simply have too much going on in our lives at the moment. It’s becoming difficult for us to manage all the tasks we have to do during the week and then, when the weekend comes and so many of us need rest, we agree to plans that we may not even want to attend because we feel like we have some sort of social obligation, or we have a fear of missing out of the event if the rest of our friends go.
It’s normal to feel this way. But it also reflects that we’re often agreeing to activities too easily, before we’ve had an opportunity to get the rest that we desire. We’re saying “yes” to things when we aren’t truly able to enjoy them, and when we haven’t had a good opportunity to care for ourselves and what we need.
Give Yourself Rest Days
Everyone needs rest days. They need time to do nothing but relax and refresh from a long week of work, school, kids, etc. If you’re finding that you’re agreeing to plans when you’re not ready for them, because you haven’t been able to take that time to yourself, then maybe 2025 is the year where you prioritize your rest days.
You can address issues like the fear of missing out or the social obligations by scheduling something else at a time when you think you’ll be ready with the people you’re hoping to see. You can also get more from your rest days by logging off and taking time to truly rest, meditate, and do what you need to do to feel refreshed so that the next social plans you have you can be excited for, rather than worried and stressed that you still have no time to rest.
Then, as long as you’re intentional on your rest day (staying relaxed instead of busy and stressed with other tasks), you’ll find you’ve got far more energy for the next get together and much less stressed about the idea that plans will go through. You may even find you have more energy to be yourself as well.
This year, prioritize your mental health, whether it’s through how you spend your time, therapy, or something else. Contact Flourish Psychology today if you’d like more personalized care, and happy new year!
It’s the middle of December, and for many, that means that now is the time when you’re struggling with seasonal affective disorder.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), often referred to as seasonal depression, is a type of depression that typically emerges during specific times of the year, most commonly in the late fall and winter. The cause of this depression varies, but is linked to a combination of a lack of sunlight, changes in social and physical behavior, and potentially stress over the holidays.
It should first be noted that seasonal depression should be treated. Depression is life altering, and even in situations where depression is seasonal, that is not only a lot of months that are spent with depression, but also the impact of those months can lead to further challenges. However, because seasonal depression has a tendency to mostly “go away” when the season changes, many people choose not to treat their seasonal depression and simply hope to wait it out.
But there’s another problem with this approach: there is no guarantee that the depression you experienced before is the same severity as the depression that you’ll experience now. Not only can the symptoms of seasonal depression cause issues even after the seasons change, but seasonal depression can also become worse in certain situations.
Why Would Seasonal Depression Get Worse?
Seasonal depression is not necessarily going to be of the same severity each and every time it is experienced. It can get worse for a variety of reasons, including:
Reduced Exposure to Natural Light
One of the primary causes of seasonal depression is the lack of sunlight during shorter days. This reduction in light can disrupt your circadian rhythm and lower serotonin levels, contributing to feelings of sadness or lethargy. Worsening symptoms might occur due to:
Spending most of your time indoors.
Cloudy or stormy weather further reducing natural light exposure.
Not using light therapy consistently.
This article that you’re reading right now is being written at 12:40am, when it’s currently 20 degrees. Next week it’s going to be freezing and raining. It would not be a surprised if you’re spending more time indoors, which could make symptoms worse.
Another thing to keep in mind that is that many of us spend more and more time on our phones, so even when we can go outside, we spend more time inside away from sunlight.
Heightened Stress Levels
Stress can exacerbate symptoms of depression, and the winter months often bring additional stressors, such as:
Holiday planning or family obligations.
Financial strain from holiday spending or heating costs.
Deadlines or work pressures at the end of the year.
Stress may intensify feelings of hopelessness or overwhelm, particularly for individuals already managing SAD.
Social Isolation
The colder months can limit social opportunities, particularly when combined with shorter days and bad weather. Increased isolation can worsen symptoms of seasonal depression, leading to:
A sense of loneliness or disconnection from others.
Less motivation to seek out support or interact socially.
Greater time spent dwelling on negative thoughts.
Many of us are spending a lot of time indoors now, even more so than usual, so it’s possible that we’re socially isolating ourselves in ways that make seasonal depression worse.
Lifestyle Changes and Habits
Certain lifestyle changes in winter can inadvertently worsen seasonal depression, such as:
A lack of physical activity, which can decrease endorphins and energy levels.
Changes in diet, such as consuming more high-carb or sugary foods, which may cause energy crashes.
Irregular sleep patterns, such as oversleeping or inconsistent bedtimes.
For individuals already managing anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, the added burden of seasonal depression can intensify symptoms. This may include:
Greater difficulty managing emotions.
Increased feelings of guilt or self-criticism.
Reduced resilience to everyday stressors.
This year is a good example of this. Imagine you were anxious or stressed in the days leading up to the election. You’re going through those emotions right as your seasonal depression is kicking in. Because you’re already stressed and anxious, your chances of a more severe seasonal depression could increase.
Hormonal Changes
Seasonal changes can influence the body’s production of melatonin and serotonin, which regulate sleep and mood. Worsening symptoms may result from:
Decreased serotonin activity, leading to greater sadness or irritability.
In addition, women that are already experiencing hormonal changes, such as perimenopause, might find that these changes make their seasonal depression worse.
No Reason at All
Depression is an emotionally heavy condition, and if it goes untreated, it may simply get worse for no clear reason at all. There may be an underlying reason that we discover in therapy, but sometimes, simply the act of having seasonal depression over and over again is enough to make it feel worse at times. Sometimes, even the stress of knowing that you have seasonal depression is enough to make it worse.
Managing Worsening Symptoms of Seasonal Depression
If you’re experiencing a worsening of seasonal depression, there are steps you can take to manage your symptoms.
You will need to maximize light exposure, spending more time outdoors and utilizing a light box if possible. You will want to exercise and stay engaged, trying to spend more time with people in your life if possible. You also need to consider seeking out professional help. Experienced therapists, like our team here at Flourish Psychology, know how to help with seasonal depression and even the lingering feelings of stress and depression that may occur afterwards.
Finding Relief
Seasonal depression doesn’t have to take over your life. Identifying the factors that worsen symptoms and taking proactive steps to address them can make a significant difference in how you feel throughout the season. If your symptoms are intensifying or becoming unmanageable, reaching out to a mental health professional can help you find effective solutions and support.
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