Welcome to the Anxiety Coaches

Coaches podcast, a relaxing and informative show where we explore anxiety, panic and PTSD sharing how you can overcome them for life.

Aloha, welcome back to the Anxiety Coaches Podcast.

In today's episode, I'm talking about what you need to know about the physical effects of anxiety.

We all know that anxiety affects your body as well as your mind. We can feel it, but we sometimes forget that some of

our physical complaints may be related to or caused by our anxiety.

In addition to worrying and feeling nervous,

you may experience changes in many different functions in your body.

One of the first ones that people notice changes in

is their digestion.

You can either be needing to run for the bathroom or you could be experiencing some real gut issues all the way up. Now it's chicken or the egg at some point as to whether the stress caused it or

not or whether you are stressed now because you have this physical distress and

illness right so it doesn't matter because both will inform the other so as

you reduce your stress you will help your

digestion. Now why would digestion be one of the first places that we notice it?

It's because when we are in fight or flight, we shut down the processes, not completely of course, but we slow

down bodily functions that are not required of us in that moment. You don't need to digest your lunch if you are running from

a tiger. It doesn't matter. Just like it shuts down or rather slows down a lot of the

reproductive organs when we are highly stressed because we don't need to reproduce if we're going to be

eaten by a tiger. The main focus there is survival. Use all energy, all hands on deck, to get you to safety.

Other things that are affected are immune function. Now we might not even think of that

because it's not something that we feel like immediately but our immune

...