Most people who struggle with anxiety have no idea that they do. Anxiety is a phenomenon that affects people with low self worth. People who struggle with anxiety struggle to find value in their humanity, and chronically feel out of place in the world around.

In this post, I am going to address three primary symptoms that people who struggle with anxiety exhibit. They are chronic worrying, poor sleep and chronic irritable mood.

Chronic Worrying

Anxiety is caused by low confidence of self, or an under developed sense of self identity. People with low self confidence find themselves chronically faced with situations they find daunting and overwhelming. They don’t believe in themselves, so they doubt their ability to excel and as a result they are excessively risk aversive. People with anxiety often wish for experiences that are problem free due to their lack of confidence in themselves to tackle any challenges life throws at them. Hence they find themselves chronically worried about what could go wrong next.

Poor Sleep.

Most people who struggle with anxiety experience poor sleep, because like most people, they believed that they are constantly supposed to sleep throughout the night. However it appears that anxious people experience a combination of their constant worries of things going wrong in their lives in addition to their concerns about not getting enough sleep. This keeps them up, sometimes into the early morning hours as they steadily transition into one state of worry to another.

Irritability

As a result of not getting enough sleep, people who struggle with anxiety present with chronic irritability. They lack patience, which affects their ability to get tasks done properly, which also negatively affects their relationships with others.

Not getting tasks complete creates a perception of unreliability in the eyes of others, which also creates unwanted friction in relationships with others. Subsequently, adding to the list of reasons of why the anxious persons should constantly be worried.

These are the three main symptoms of anxiety that characterize an anxious person, other symptoms not mentioned such as irrational fears and panic attacks are really sub categories for chronic worrying. This is because chronic worrying encompasses any and all things that could possible go wrong in the person’s life, real or perceived.

A proper course of treatment for someone who struggles with these symptoms of anxiety would be identifying core beliefs which irrationally dictate that things should not go wrong in his or her lives, and changing such beliefs to beliefs that emphasize values of courage and emotional resiliency.

So rather than chronically focusing on what could go wrong in your life, through proper treatment, a person who struggles with anxiety transitions to a person who comes to see his or herself has having the resiliency to survive and thrive through any challenge that comes his or her way.

Ugo is a psychotherapist and professional life coach.