Physical feelings of anxiety that I get:

• Shaking, in muscles that I’m using– I can mostly stop it if I can lie completely limp and still, but when I try to move voluntarily, those muscles also shake.
• Increased blood pressure (?) and heart rate– I can feel my heartbeat more strongly than usual, and sometimes even hear it in my ears, which I think corresponds to higher blood pressure? And my heart beats faster.
• This sort of prickly, staticky, vaguely achy feeling that I described in the previous post. I think it relates to holding tension in my muscles in a certain way. Goes along with shaking.
• Brief dizziness– like a mild version of the low-blood-pressure feeling of standing up suddenly, when I haven’t actually moved. Presumably some kind of heart thing.

Things I do when I’m anxious:

• Hold my core muscles very tense, to the exclusion of breathing “properly” (at least, what I consider properly as a former singer). I’m still more-or-less filling my lungs, but I’m not letting my stomach expand at all.
• Okay, I probably do breathe slightly more shallowly.
• Put a hand over my chest– I find having pressure on my chest comforting. Fiddling with my necklace may be a mild version of this but isn’t always; pressing my palm flat against my chest probably means I’m feeling anxious.
• Move less– for me, fidgeting usually means I’m thinking hard, not that I’m anxious. When I’m anxious I sit very still, and I may move my hands less even while I’m doing something functional like using the computer. If I’m anxious enough to be shaking, I’ll be looking for “stable” positions where I can relax my muscles completely and not shake. E.g. I’ll get into a position with one hand over the arrow keys, the other on the armrest, and not move them away. I also move my head less. When I’m standing I may physically brace my hands on things, like a table or the wall.
• Speak less, and in a higher voice than usual. I usually have no trouble thinking in words, but I sometimes do have trouble interrupting my frozenness to actually speak. When it comes to my breathing, “frozen” tends to be expressed as “slow and shallow and very even”, and it’s hard for me to stop, to interrupt the pattern.

Things I want when I’m anxious:

• To feel like I have a clear path to whatever I might need if what I’m anxious about happens. This includes a physically clear path, and things like having to explain myself to the people around me. So I may want to be alone.
• Subset of the above: to take out and have “on hand” things I might need.
• A physically stable place to sit/lie down, to minimize dizzy feelings and shaking.

And I am currently being reminded that when I’m coming down from anxiety and feeling very relaxed, I do the thing where I breathe really slowly and this may not be good for my non-dizziness.

I often have physical feelings of anxiety without having, like, racing worrying what-if thoughts. Sometimes without anything to be anxious about that I can identify, at all.

Other times I have lots of worrying thoughts with slightly less physical symptoms, more like what you’d probably think of when you hear “anxiety”.