Anxiety definitely affects your body as well as your mind. One of the common symptoms is anxiety induced muscle twitching. A muscle or a group of muscles seem to take on a mind of their own and begin that annoying twitching.
While anxiety twitching is not a serious condition, people with anxiety will often believe it is a sign of something much more serious. In many people’s minds, muscle twitching is associated with very serious medical disorders.
But anxiety twitching is only annoying, not medically dangerous. It just shows your body reacting to the stress of anxiety.
What Causes Anxiety Twitching?
When you’re anxious, your body is under stress. Stress can lead nerves to be overstimulated. This kind of stimulation can cause your nervous system to function erratically, causing the impulses that energize nerves to be out of control. This leads to these nerves stimulating muscles or muscle groups to twitch uncontrollably.
The anxiety twitching will continue as long as the stress caused by anxiety continues.
Other causes of anxiety twitching include the adrenaline that circulates through the system when you have anxiety and are under stress. Low magnesium and potassium levels that are seen in anxiety also can cause muscles to twitch.
Whatever the cause, focusing on the twitching muscles and worrying about what they mean will bring more anxiety and more stress. This in turn leads to more anxiety twitching. This is one of the curious things about anxiety and the physical symptoms that comes with it. The symptoms cause more anxiety that causes more symptoms.
Characteristics of Anxiety Twitching
The muscle twitching caused by anxiety can be seen in individual muscles or in groups of muscles. It may stay in one muscle group or move randomly around your body.
The twitching may last for a few minutes or go on for hours or longer. It may get either better or worse when you’re trying to sleep. Some people report their twitching to get worse as stress and anxiety increase, but it doesn’t seem to ease very fast when the anxiety is over.
Any muscle group can be affected by anxiety twitching.
Muscle twitching doesn’t even always need anxiety to occur. Even in times of calm, your muscles can misfire, in a sense.
And there isn’t anything that you can do to stop your muscles from twitching. The more you pay attention to the twitching, the more your muscles twitch. Also, you can’t relax the twitching away.
The longer you’ve been anxious, the more likely you’ll experience anxiety twitching. Even at times when you’re not anxious.
Caution
While most cases of anxiety muscle twitching are completely harmless, there may be times when this symptom signals a more serious disorder. If you have muscle weakness and/or slurred speech with the muscle twitching, you need to consult with your healthcare professional to be sure whether there is any serious physical reason for the twitching.
Some serious physical illnesses, such as motor neuron disease, show up early as weakness and persistent fatigue, as well as muscle twitching.