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Health Effects of Anxiety

Most mental health conditions lead to physical health conditions if they are not taken care of in a prompt manner. While medical science has a hard time explaining disorders that have no organic cause, I strongly believe that many physical pains are the result of psychological stress, which can include anxiety. Somatization disorder is one psychological disorder recognized by the medical community that can cause organic dysfunctions. The Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders explains this disorder quite well:

    "Somatization disorder is a psychiatric condition marked by multiple medically unexplained physical, or somatic, symptoms. In order to qualify for the diagnosis of somatization disorder, somatic complaints must be serious enough to interfere significantly with a person's ability to perform important activities, such as work, school or family and social responsibilities, or lead the person experiencing the symptoms to seek medical treatment" (Somatization Disorder, 2007).

The interesting point about the somatization disorder definition given in the previous quote is that it says that, “[i]n order to qualify for the diagnosis of somatization disorder, somatic complaints must be serious enough to interfere significantly with a person’s ability to perform important activities, such as work, school or family and social responsibilities” which means that a person may have many physical ailments in his or her life that are remaining untreated because doctors most often pay attention to that aspect of a disorder. If a person comes in complaining of some kind of physical pain but it does not really seem to harm that person’s functioning too much, doctors will take the disorder less seriously, or maybe even accuse the patient of being a hypochondriac.

The other, and probably more prevalent, problem with somatization disorder is that doctors, in the vast majority of cases, are looking only for a physical cause for the pain, and only within the last twenty-five years or so has the thinking begun to change such that some doctors (probably less than 1% of all doctors) will consider that a mental disorder of some kind will begin to cause physical dysfunction. On the extreme end, people have gone blind and regained sight miraculously, and on the more common end, people lose sleep and gain better sleep as they reduce their stress levels.

What does all this have to do with anxiety? It is my belief, and science bears this out to some degree at this point, that the more anxiety a person experiences, the more sickness and physical dysfunction that is caused in a person’s life. For example, we all know people who are very stressed people and who tend to become sick more often than most people. In my own life, I am a person who handles anxiety rather well for the most part, and I rarely ever become sick. However, I think that the years of anxiety that I have experienced have led to a couple physical conditions in my life. The first one that has been prevalent since I was a teenager is a disorder when I urinate frequently. I am twenty-six years old at the time of this writing, and I have been tested for diabetes, had my prostate examined, and have been to a couple of doctors for a urinary tract infection. Each and every test or attempt to heal the condition met failure or found no organic cause for the disorder, and what I believe is that all the anxiety that I still carry around, which is noticeable but not as much as it used to be, gets converted by my brain into a urinary disorder. I believe that as I continue to reduce anxiety’s presence in my life, that this condition will slowly also continue to relieve itself. The other challenge that I have met is that I have thrown out my back twice, once when I was twenty-five, and again not too long after I turned twenty-six. I was in such pain that I was only able to barely drag myself to the bathroom for the first day, and then sort of hobble around the second. I have also experienced back pain, in particular around stressful and anxiety-provoking times, although my back has not gone out totally for several months now. I went to a doctor for it and she was completely stumped, although she did not admit it, and very unconfidently told me that I had a “micro fracture.” The way I attempt to treat this condition, after reading a book, is to tell myself, whenever I have back pain, that it is because of stress and not because I have a “bad back.” The pain then tends to go away, and after a recent bout of stress that began to relieve itself, my back also relieved itself of pain as well. So, I feel very confident in self-diagnosing in this matter.

So, if you or someone you know has been to many different doctors for some physical condition (perhaps Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and the doctors seem to not be able to solve the problem, try treating the problem yourself by reducing your anxiety level and any other stressors in your life. Medicine and doctors have a certain level of arrogance about them that tries to tell people that the doctors and medicine know best, but very often, doctors do not have the solution. Of course, do not take this advice as saying that one should never see a doctor – there are many different physical disorders out there that do have physical causes and that can be best solved by doctors – a broken leg for example. But, if doctors are unable to solve the problem in one or two tries, the problem might be caused by anxiety or stress.

It is my personal belief that every anxious thought or stressful event, no matter how small, has a physical effect on the body. At some point, the body begins to experience noticeable physical symptoms when the stress has built up too much. To combat this, one simply needs to reduce stress using whatever methods seem to work best for him or her, and if anxiety and stress is the cause, then the physical symptoms should reduce or cease as well. Good luck, and hopefully this helps those of us who have seemingly incurable conditions!

References

(2007). Somatization Disorder. The Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders. Retrieved July 7, 2009 from http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Somatization-disorder.html

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