How Anxiety Impacts Your Mental — and Physical Health

Approximately 40 million adults in the US have an anxiety disorder, to say nothing of the scores of children and adolescents who also struggle with excessive fear and worry. Anxiety disorders can cast a wide net over your mental, emotional, and physical health, making life challenging.

At South Florida Psychiatry, Dr. Ernesto L. Sarduy specializes in helping people to overcome a wide range of mental health issues, which includes anxiety disorders.

Here, we take a closer look at how an anxiety disorder can affect almost every area of your health and, more importantly, how we can help.

Behind the anxiety

Anxiety can present itself in several ways, including:

• Generalized anxiety disorder
• Panic attack disorder
• Post-traumatic stress syndrome
• Social anxiety disorder
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Phobias

Although these disorders have their own unique characteristics, most include an overwhelming sense of worry, fear, dread, and sometimes guilt.

Mental health issues associated with anxiety

Anxiety on its own can have a considerable impact, often shrinking your world as you isolate yourself into a space where you attempt to keep your symptoms to a minimum. As a result, social relationships can be affected, which can affect your emotional health. As well, your performance at work or at school can also decline.

Aside from the direct effect that an anxiety disorder can have on your life, the condition is also associated with other mental health issues, including:

• Eating disorders
• Depression
• Substance use disorders

To give you an idea about the strong connection that anxiety can have with other mental health issues, 20% of people with an anxiety or mood disorder also have a substance use disorder.

Anxiety and your physical health

When you have an anxiety disorder, your body is struck in a stress response. Also called the fight-or-flight response, physical changes can occur in your body when you’re stressed, including:

• Rapid heart rate and high blood pressure
• Muscle tension
• Shallow breathing
• Gastrointestinal upset

When you have an anxiety disorder, this constant state of stress can exact a physical toll on your body, leaving you with muscle pain, fatigue, headaches, and more.

Breaking free from anxiety

The goal at our practice is to minimize the impact that anxiety can have on your health by addressing your anxiety directly through a wide range of psychotherapies, including:

• Cognitive behavioral therapy
• Brief dynamic therapy
• Interpersonal therapy
• Psychodynamic therapy
• Positive psychology
• Behavior modification
• Trauma-focused therapy
• Humanistic therapy
• Solution-focused brief therapy 
• Cognitive processing 
• Psychoanalytic therapy

It’s impossible to say here which psychotherapy would work best for you, but we want you to know that there are many ways in which we can release the hold that your anxiety has on you.

As well, if your anxiety is severe, we can also turn to short-term medications to relieve your symptoms. This short-term relief is designed to allow you to move forward with your psychotherapy for longer-lasting results.

The bottom line is that an anxiety disorder can hijack your life, and our goal is to work with you to achieve optimal mental, emotional, and physical health.

For expert treatment of your anxiety disorder, we invite you to contact our office in Town Center One in Miami, Florida, to schedule a consultation.