Commonly Missed Anxiety Symptoms in Women
Anxiety impacts people of all genders and ages but usually manifests differently in people of different ages and genders. Anxiety occurs twice as often in women as in men and are they found to experience Generalized Anxiety, Panic Disorder, Phobias, PTSD and Social Anxiety. Symptoms of anxiety in midlife differ than symptoms of anxiety during childhood. Today we will explore what anxiety looks like for women ages 30 to 50.
Women approaching midlife traditionally experience a higher propensity toward anxiety disorders.
Usually, these anxiety disorders fall within generalized anxiety, PTSD, and panic attacks. Hormonal changes that happen during motherhood, pre-menopause, and menopause are all reasons for these anxiety disorders.
Women in their thirties to fifties are normally facing the peak of life’s highest demands as they try to meet expectations imposed on women from society. Women embrace the idea that they can “have everything,” including chasing career growth, raising children, managing the home, and maintaining active social lives.
Women measure their lives to other mothers and businesswomen around them and strive to keep up appearances. During these years, suppressed memories of former sexual assault or abuse can often crop up and lead to latent anxiety or PTSD symptoms.
What follows is a breakdown of the symptoms of Generalized Anxiety, Panic Disorder, and PTSD. You may not realize that some of the symptoms that are outlined below accompany these diagnoses.
Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Generalized Anxiety Disorder manifests itself as excessive anxiety and intense worry about a whole host of things. This worry comes quickly and can be a real challenge to control.
This anxiety is associated with not less than three of the following physical or cognitive symptoms, including fatigue, restlessness, muscle tension, irritability, difficulty concentrating, and sleep disturbances. If you have experienced three or more of these symptoms on a regular basis for 6+ months, you most likely are living with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
Commonly Missed Anxiety Symptoms in Women:
Difficulty Concentrating
Many women struggle to simply focus on what’s happening around them. They begin a task and then shortly after may realize, “Woah. My mind has totally been wandering.” This lack of focus can become a detriment to productivity.
Sometimes it’s worrying thoughts that are distracting the person with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, but other times that person is unable to focus long enough to complete the task at hand. Either of these can still point to you experiencing anxiety.
Difficulty Sleeping
Tossing and turning is a symptom of anxiety in women ages 30 to 50. Mothers are used to losing solid, uninterrupted sleep when the baby comes, but there could be other signs to look out for. If your day is full of anxiety then your sleep might be interrupted by nightmares or other internal thoughts.
You get in bed to catch some shut-eye and the thoughts that plague you make it nearly impossible to fall asleep. You might eventually be able to drop off to sleep, but sleep is still elusive. If this is part of your nightly routine, you might be suffering from anxiety.
Symptoms of Panic Disorder
A panic attack happens suddenly and escalates to its peak within minutes. It’s diagnosed when four of the below symptoms are met and often can be overlooked because the symptoms are similar to heart disorders, breathing issues and other health problems.
Recurring panic attacks include four or more of the following symptoms. Pounding heart or accelerated heart rate, palpitations, trembling or shaking, sweating, feelings of choking, feeling short of breath or like you are smothering, discomfort or pain in the chest, feeling dizzy, nausea or abdominal distress, unsteadiness, light-headedness, or faintness, paresthesia (numbness or tingling sensations), chills or heat sensations, fear of losing control or “going crazy,” derealization (feelings of unreality) or depersonalization (being detached from oneself), fear of dying.
At least one panic attack is followed by one month of persistent worry of having more panic attacks. Also, there’s a presence of persistent behavioral changes that occur to avoid an attack, including avoiding similar situations that caused the attack in the first place.
Commonly Missed Symptoms:
Accurately Identifying Physical Symptoms as Anxiety
A panic attack itself is extremely noticeable. The physical signs can be frightening for someone who has never suffered through an anxiety attack. However, interpreting the symptoms accurately is harder to do.
Perhaps you have been experiencing tightness of the chest for days and wonder if your heart is healthy. This is one of the ways symptoms aren’t viewed accurately because anxiety may not have been on your radar as the problem.
The Fear of Recurring Panic Attacks
Once you’ve gone through a panic attack, a fear can grip you about when the next anxiety attack will occur. The worry about physically experiencing another panic attack is all-consuming, yet a normal part of the anxiety experience of a panic disorder.
Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
PTSD symptoms occur after being exposed to death, injury, or violence. This can happen by directly witnessing the trauma, or by learning the details of a trauma indirectly.
PTSD also happens when you’re experiencing the traumatic event in certain ways that include nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts or exposure to something that triggers traumatic reminders. Completely avoiding thoughts, feelings, or reminders of the traumatic experience can also be a symptom of PTSD. Usually, symptoms must have lasted for one month, but not all symptoms have to exist to be diagnosed with PTSD.
Commonly Missed Symptoms:
Self-Blame
Women often internalize traumatic events and feel responsible for what happened. In an attempt to minimize the pain, they just self-blame. Women are known to shoulder burdens and this behavior puts them at higher risk for experiencing PTSD when they are exposed to a traumatic event.
Christian Counselors Are Ready to Help
Don’t let the pressure of being perfect prevent you from seeking help. If you are women between the ages of 30 and 50 and find yourself relating to what’s been shared in this post, help is out there. Taking the step of finding a counselor can be daunting, but it can lead to incredible freedom in your life. Counseling can help in ways you might not even realize.
Remember, you are not alone. Anxiety is common and treatable. A professional, established counselor will come alongside you during this season of life and equip with the tools to take on your anxiety.
“Portrait,” courtesy of Remy Loz, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Alone,” courtesy of Ann Demianenko, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Nervous,” courtesy of Eddie Kopp, unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Trapped,” courtesy of Paul Gilmore, unsplash.com, Public Domain License
God created us to be imaginative, but because of our sin natures we often use the gift of imagination for evil purposes, such as sexually depraved thoughts. By contrast, it’s vital for Christians to cultivate a healthy sexual thought life. If you’re married, this doesn’t mean repressing sexual thoughts; it means channeling them appropriately.
Again, it’s normal to simply recognize that someone is attractive, but it’s sin to allow that thought to turn into something more. This means you need to avoid “checking out” anyone other than your spouse.
The entertainment industry glamorizes illicit sex, yet often ignores the resulting fallout of heartache, sexually transmitted diseases, unintended pregnancy, broken families, and more.
We all have physical flaws; don’t focus on your partner’s while fantasizing about perfection. “Continued fantasies about women with big breasts, or men with muscular shoulders, are stupid if your partner is small. The same can be said about not taking the energy to allow your mate to be erotically attractive to you and fantasizing that you are making love to someone else.” (79)
If a child has endured consistent loss, all of those feelings and memories can be reignited in adulthood when triggered.
Fear of abandonment is involuntary. Because of life events that were out of your control, this fear has been instilled inside of you. Here are five symptoms that are associated with a fear of abandonment.
When someone re-enacts trauma it’s a subconscious effort to resolve past trauma. This could manifest by being attracted to the “wrong” person who is noncommittal and hurtful. You begin to project your insecurities on those around you.
Shame and condemnation bombard you daily. An onslaught of thoughts around worthlessness fills your mind. Those who can relate to a fear of abandonment normally find themselves wanting to cling to people, yet wanting to avoid intimacy at the same time.
A wife feels like she’s given every ounce of herself and then her husband asks for even more of her. Life can feel like everybody in the house is constantly taking from you, without any replenishment occurring.
Hormone changes can dramatically decrease the desire to have sex. If you’ve been pregnant, or are in the early years of raising children, it can feel like your body no longer belongs to you.
It’s important to work on marriage problems as they arise in order to reduce their negative impact on the relationship, including the sexual relationship. It’s one thing to believe your marriage is a priority, but it’s important to take practical steps to keep it that way. The more issues fester, the more work it takes to get back to a place of intimacy.
Maybe you need a different form of affection to boost your sex drive, or your husband to watch the kids while you go for a pedicure, or you need an evening away together to get excitement growing again. Women have different reasons for their low sex drive which means not every woman will recover their sex drive in the same way.
Parents who think they’ve made a reasonable request might not know how to react when their children respond in anger.
It’s important to remind yourself that your child is the only one who possesses the ability to change his or her behavior.
We introduced this topic in our discussion on reflective listening. Acknowledging a child’s feelings means you verbally reflect what you think their current thoughts and emotions are. Pay attention to facial expressions, body language, and both verbal and nonverbal cues.
“You may choose to hit your pillow or you may choose to hit a beanbag.”
Codependents may feel as if they are some sort of hero for constantly saving the addict from themselves. But in reality, they are not helping the addict recover and are only compounding their issues. You could say that the codependent person has a control addiction in the same way that the addict does for a particular substance.
Many would describe the Christian life as “just one beggar showing another beggar where to get some bread.” This is a brilliant quote as it sums up what the Christian faith is all about. We all need the Lord and our aim should be to point each other to Him.
Those who are more susceptible to codependency are often seeking after a predictable way to attain a sense of value that has been lacking in their past.
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? (Matthew 7:3)
This example of a flight-or-fight response is similar to the ones people experience in most dangerous, life-threatening situations. Our brain assesses the risk and tells our body how to respond
We hope this post will provide you with an overview of successful interventions and give you examples of common treatment plans for this disorder. The four following approaches can help people cope with their social anxiety:
Our thoughts are powerful, and when they are unhelpful, they can be powerful barriers to overcoming social anxiety. Our willingness to participate in social activities is directly related to how we think about ourselves, about others, about the situation, etc. Negative thoughts lead to increased anxiety.
Social anxiety disorder acts like a phobia. When you are afraid of something, you tend to avoid it. People with social anxiety disorder avoid social situations. They experience anxiety when confronted with particular stimuli (speaking in public, taking public transportation, attending parties, etc.), and when they avoid that stimulus, their anxiety is reduced.
It should come as no surprise that the answer is yes, but that its relative success depends entirely on both parties’ level of dedication both to each other and the counseling process.
Making the decision together to seek help from a marriage counselor is a hopeful sign for the future. This simple action proclaims that overcoming your problems and finding a new and better way to relate, encourage emotional growth, and encourage relational health is possible.
When a marriage fails, it never does so in a vacuum. Every single relationship that the couple has is impacted. It goes without saying that the failure usually causes devastation to both partners, and in more ways than one. Any children involved can be so heavily damaged by it that it can destroy their capacity for trust in relationships and affect their ability to commit to marriage, themselves.
Sadly, some couples don’t try to get counseling until they are way past the point of no return. If communication has deteriorated to the point that words are only being used as weapons, no progress can be made in or out of counseling.
Simply put, there is no one right path of grief, and you should never feel under pressure to conform to one particular way. David Kessler, an expert on grief, writes that the stages of grief “are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling.”
Grief is a process and should be viewed in the long-term. Too often, we look for a “quick fix” or the ability to rush through the prescribed “stages of grief,” failing to give ourselves ample time. It is important to note, however, that even with all the time in the world, the pain may never fully leave you.
In his book, A Grief Observed, Lewis wrote: “He will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones, and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off.”
Though it may seem counterintuitive, anger may at times be helpful because it helps us release our emotions, instead of merely turning numb. Though the anger may be directed at any number of different things, it is always rooted in pain.
Unfortunately, they aren’t immune to anxiety. They enter this big, scary world and face many mountains of their own. Think about moving towns, changing schools or even having to participate in a spelling bee when there’s a learning or attention issue. Anxiety can be crippling at any age.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel helpless when your child is facing anxiety, but when you remain steadfast and calm you can be fully present to guide your child through their everyday anxiety.
Help your child understand how the body changes when experiencing fear and anxiety, so he can begin to recognize the signs. Teach your child to talk back to their worries and fears. Imagine worry as a big bully or monster that can be conquered by telling why it isn’t welcome in your world.
Instead, you can think of it this way, “The bus driver is a professional and cares about the kids. My classmates show up every day to school without getting left somewhere else. My good friend Robby would sit with me if I asked him. My classmates even talk about how much fun it is to ride a bus.” The thoughts slowly shift to ones of excitement and confidence.