Anxiety and Its Effect on Your Body: A Personal Perspective
Many of my young clients push themselves hard — especially the perfectionistic, anxiety-prone ones. When you're young, your body can handle it. But as you age, recovering from stress gets slower. You may start noticing headaches, fatigue, jitteriness, sleep or digestive issues. Maybe hives, trouble swallowing, or appetite loss that leads to unhealthy weight loss.
As someone who has navigated both a nervous temperament and chronic illness, I want to offer my perspective on tending to your body now. You may not recognize anxiety and its effects on your body because you're younger and resilient. But trust me, it catches up with you.
If you're young, anxious, and driven, watch for four traps:
Over-committing yourself
Ignoring your body's needs
Doing unhealthy things to conform
Checking out of your body (often involuntarily)
Trap 1: Over-committing creates anxiety and its effects on the body
We live in a productivity-obsessed culture. If you're a perfectionist who feels you have to prove your worth, you push even harder. Maybe you've seen warning signs — a weakened immune system, digestive trouble, getting sick more often — but you ignored them because they didn't fit your quest for approval. If you can catch this pattern young, you can interrupt it. Are you uncomfortable being still because you might notice how you truly feel? Is your worth tied to producing? Either way, it's fueling your anxiety.
You may be especially driven to overperform in college at places like Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo or Cal State Northridge. Your schedule needs to honor your body and spirit, not just your academics or career.
Trap 2: Ignoring your body's needs leads to physical signs of anxiety.
When you're anxious, thoughts can drown out body signals. Repetitive strain, poor posture, skipped meals — it catches up. Many people ignore a sensation until their body screams at them. By then, the cost is higher.
Trap 3: Conforming to beauty standards.
Culture obsesses over youth and appearance. Ask yourself honestly: What do I do in the name of being acceptable? Am I doing this to be healthy, or to fit someone else's definition?
Among U.S. young adults, eating disorder risk peaks around age 21 — roughly 10.3% for young women and 7.4% for young men per JAMA. You may not meet full criteria for anorexia or bulimia, but anxiety about what you eat, how you exercise, and how you appear can still take a real toll on your mental and physical health.
It's developmentally normal to care what others think. But if you're using unhealthy, unrealistic standards to measure your worth, that's a dangerous trap. It breeds anxiety, depression, and obsession with surface-level things that won't last — and it can lead to checking out of your body entirely, because the weight of all that worry is too much to carry.
Trap 4: Checking out to cope with anxiety.
When you've heard enough that you're not acceptable — from bullying, emotional abuse, or even medical trauma — it becomes hard to stay present in your body. You might have mysterious illnesses, ignore hunger or thirst, or dissociate without realizing it.
That's beyond one blog post, but if it resonates, consider professional help to reinhabit your body. I teach body-based approaches — EMDR therapy, somatic stress release, and clinical hypnosis — to address the physical effects of anxiety and stress before they become chronic. If you're interested, give me a call or click below.
