Is anxiety making you sick?

Chest pain, nausea and frequent headaches are linked to constant worrying. We chat to the experts about how to stop anxiety from affecting your health.

- EVA-MARIA BOBBERT

When I was 10 I watched Poltergeist at a friend’s birthday sleepover. That night I feared every rustle or hum of the house was the psycho clown making a move to strangle me. Would anyone hear me scream? Would I be able to fend him off? Should I wake the others? I lay frozen, heart pounding and breathing in shallow bursts, fervently wishing I had devoted more time to acrobatics than books so I could deftly manoeuvre to the door without risking suffocation by a demonic stuffed toy.

You could not have convinced me that my life was not in danger that night (or, to be honest, for quite a few sleepless nights thereafter). It might seem a giggle now, but that kind of catastrophising isn’t confined to childhood – it’s a form of anxiety that can rise up at any life stage. And it can make you feel quite unwell.

“When those anxious thoughts arise and you put the spotlight on them and start to ruminate over that feared event in the future, doing so causes your body to respond,” says Dr Julie Smith, clinical psychologist and author of Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before. Your body can respond in any number of ways – chest pain, nausea, rapid heartbeat, shaking and shortness of breath are common responses when cortisol (the stress hormone) is swirling through your system.

“Anxious thoughts are threat-focused,” says Dr Smith. “When we spend time with them, they feed back to your body and brain to ramp up the threat response.” That’s well and good when there’s a real threat – we are, after all, equipped with this prehistoric internal warning system to save us from imminent danger – but it’s another thing entirely when that survival response is constantly triggered by false alarms.