Anxiety affects everyone at some point in their life. At this point of the year, you could be starting anew job, or a new school or face new and different challenges that can bring up your anxiety. This could be mild anxiety to more frequent and sever symptoms like panic attacks. Although the cause of anxiety is not fully understood, there are known triggers and contributions that may cause you to feel this way.
Triggers
Past Trauma
This could include past trauma from childhood, accidents, and also negative experiences. Without realising these traumatic events can cause present day trauma, where perhaps normal everyday things can act as triggers to things that happened years ago. For example the trauma of being bullied in the past may cause in the present day to have fear and stress over interacting with others. If you are having difficulty with dealing with a traumatic issue seeking help from a professional might be the option for you.
Inherited or mimicked by family members
Anxiety may also affect the people you live with and surround yourself with. We learn behaviour from our parents and grandparents growing up as well as other people we spend time with. If anxiety affects your parents, you will be watching and learning how they deal with everyday life.
Behaviours and thoughts like overly stressing about things, having fear based thoughts verbalised, worrying, being tense, being nervous, being restless, etc. These behaviours can be learnt and carried on to children.
People generally have 60-70,000 thoughts per day. 80-90% of these thoughts are the same every single day. Generally a lot of these thoughts will be worry or fear based and this can lead to feelings of anxiousness.
For example, you may have had an experience where something negative happens to you and you start to have new thoughts and believes based around that experience. If those same thoughts keep repeating for weeks, months to years, without being corrected or addressed, they have now become a part of your daily life and thought habit. This habit can become your personality unconsciously as we are not always present to our thoughts and what we are telling ourselves.
Physical stress, poor health and disease.
The nervous system is very closely connected to the body's systems and organs. Emotional and physical stress affect each other so an imbalance may throw out either one of these systems.
For example experiencing high stress can cause the body to have an allergic reaction in response to the emotional or mental stress. At the same time if your body is not at its optimum state due to disease and other factors, it can impact your mental wellbeing and cause anxiety and stress.
Examples are:
Hormonal disorders like hyperthyroidism
Diabetes
Respiratory conditions like asthma
Drug side effects or misuse
Drug, alcohol and other withdrawal including cigarettes, caffeine, sugar etc.
Nutrient and mineral deficiencies