What Is Chronic Anxiety? Symptoms, Causes, & Treatment

What Is Chronic Anxiety?

Chronic anxiety differs from occasional anxiety experienced in everyday life. Chronic anxiety is a persistent, long-term condition that can significantly affect various aspects of an individual’s life such as physical and mental health, job performance, and relationship satisfaction. Some of the characteristics that distinguish chronic anxiety from acute anxiety episodes are its duration and intensity.

While acute anxiety likely arises during stressful or chaotic life events and then resolves shortly after, chronic anxiety may have no apparent cause and can feel like it never goes away. Chronic anxiety can manifest as various disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, and others.¹

Symptoms of Chronic Anxiety

Symptoms of chronic anxiety can manifest as psychological and physical symptoms. Some of the common symptoms of chronic anxiety include headaches or digestion issues, as well as obsessive thoughts and worry.

Psychological Symptoms of Prolonged Anxiety

Some symptoms of anxiety are psychological such as obsessive thoughts, inability to concentrate, and constant worry. While many of these symptoms can occur during normal times such as during stress, the key is the persistent nature of these symptoms in chronic anxiety cases.

Common psychological symptoms of chronic anxiety include:

• Constant worry
• Irritability
• Hypervigilance
• Panic attacks
• Dissociation events
• Difficulty concentrating
• Struggling to make decisions
• Obsessive thoughts
• Being unable to talk about anything else

Physical Symptoms of Prolonged Anxiety

Some symptoms of anxiety are physical, such as headaches, muscle tension, and loss of appetite or overeating. While many of these physical symptoms can occur without anxiety, the key is the persistent nature of these symptoms in chronic anxiety cases.

Some physical symptoms of chronic anxiety include:

• Fatigue
• Nausea or stomach pain
• Restlessness
• Muscle tension
• Sleep disturbances
• Headaches
• Indigestion
• Increased heart rate
• Fatigue
• Loss of appetite or overeating
• Anxiety-induced weight loss or weight gain

Causes & Risk Factors for Chronic Anxiety

Some of the potential causes and risk factors for developing chronic anxiety include genetic predisposition, environmental influences, life events, and psychological and physiological factors.

While situational events or factors such as traumatic events can certainly lead to chronic anxiety, for most people, chronic anxiety results from a combination of these factors.

Diagnosing Chronic Anxiety

The process of diagnosing chronic anxiety involves having an assessment with a mental health professional. This person will usually ask about your symptoms, your family and social history, and may ask about physical health symptoms as well. All of this information will be used in combination to make an accurate diagnosis.

Some of the criteria used for diagnosis include an assessment of the duration and intensity of symptoms.¹ It is important for a comprehensive evaluation to rule out other possible conditions before making a final diagnosis of chronic anxiety.

How to Cope With Chronic Anxiety

It can be difficult to know what to do when feeling anxious, especially when the symptoms get bad. Having coping strategies available to help manage negative symptoms as they occur can help you decrease their severity.

Lifestyle changes, natural anxiety remedies, and anxiety coping strategies are all things that can aid in managing chronic anxiety.

Some ways to cope with chronic anxiety include:

• Stress management techniques: There are many stress management techniques that help someone cope with chronic anxiety. Putting away the schoolwork or project you are working on to take time for yourself, making sure to take breaks, and taking time for fun and relaxation are important suggestions. The key is to find what works for you.
• Exercise: Research shows that exercise helps anxiety and mental health symptoms.² The good news is that you do not have to engage in strenuous activities- just a 10 minute walk or taking some time to stretch may help relieve or manage chronic anxiety.
• Ensure adequate rest: Because there is a connection between sleep and mental health, having a bad night’s sleep can cause anxiety to worsen. Developing good sleep hygiene can help manage anxiety symptoms.³
• Remain medication compliant: If you are prescribed any medications to help your mental health, making sure to take them as scheduled without skipping doses can help manage your symptoms of chronic anxiety.
• Ensuring adequate food intake: What we eat can affect our mental health. Skipping meals can increase anxiety symptoms, just as eating too much sugar or caffeine. It is best to be mindful of what works best for your body.
• Remain hydrated: Ensuring adequate water intake can help prevent dehydration and help manage anxiety symptoms.
• Using grounding techniques: When you notice your anxiety getting bad, take a moment to ground yourself and try grounding techniques. Where are you? Describe the location and the feeling of the chair you are sitting in or the floor you are standing in. This helps to bring your focus to the present to decrease anxiety symptoms.
• Reach out to social supports: Using your available support system such as friends and family can help to give you someone to talk to and remind you you are not alone.
• Prioritize self care: Maintaining adequate time for self-care practices can help keep anxiety symptoms getting too intense by giving you time to decompress and manage stress.
• Develop self-awareness: Starting to recognize situations where anxiety is worse can help you avoid potentially triggering environments
• Do a body scan: Where are you noticing the anxiety in your body? Do your shoulders or jaw feel tense? Sometimes taking a moment to do a body scan and notice where the anxiety is felt in the body helps to increase awareness of symptoms, which helps to minimize their severity.

Treatment Options for Chronic Anxiety

Some of the various anxiety treatment options available for chronic anxiety include therapeutic techniques that involve recognizing thoughts that contribute to anxiety, as well as learning how to manage the symptoms when they arise.

Therapy

There are multiple therapy options for anxiety, including dialectical behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as using art and music in therapy. Choosing an appropriate type of therapy is a personal experience and sometimes involves trying out different types to see what you feel most comfortable with.

Some common types of therapy for chronic anxiety include:

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): CBT for anxiety helps someone with chronic anxiety learn how their thoughts and behavior affect each other.
• Compassion-focused therapy:  Compassion-focused therapy incorporates self-compassion into therapy treatment to help people learn how to treat themselves and others with greater amounts of kindness to help improve mental health symptoms.
• Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT): DBT for anxiety is a form of therapy that helps teach people how to better self-regulate when faced with difficult feelings or distressing situations.
• Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT): Through acceptance and commitment therapy for anxiety, individuals learn that negative or stressful emotions are inevitable, and thus unavoidable, people learn how to manage negative feelings when they come up instead of working to avoid them.
• Art and music therapy: Art and music therapy engages the creative parts of our brain to help decrease symptoms of anxiety. This form of therapy can help those who are experiencing frequent anxiety.⁴
• Emotion-focused coping: Emotion-focused coping is a technique where clients learn skills to help manage distressing emotions. This technique can help someone who struggles to express their feelings by helping to develop self-awareness and working to decrease negative feelings.

Medication

For some, medication to treat anxiety symptoms may be necessary in order to improve quality of life. Medical prescribers may recommend medication options such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications to help decrease or manage the symptoms of anxiety and other co-occurring symptoms. Some common medications prescribed for anxiety include SSRIs and SNRIs to treat symptoms.⁵ These medications may include Celexa, Zoloft, Cymbalta, or other medications.

For those whose symptoms are unmanageable with ongoing medications and therapy, a short-term acting medication is sometimes prescribed. These are often benzodiazepines such as Xanax, which are prescribed to treat situational increases in anxiety such as panic attacks. Due to risk of misuse and addiction, these medications are typically only recommended for short-term use.

Where to Find Professional Help for Chronic Anxiety

The best recommendation for treating anxiety is to combine medication with psychotherapy, as there are many potential benefits of a combined approach.If you are experiencing chronic anxiety, there are some ways to find a therapist to help.

Using an online therapist directory or online therapy platform for anxiety is helpful to find a therapist who is licensed in your area. Search for a therapist who specializes in anxiety and who uses one of the methods listed above that you would like to try.