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Anxiety, emotions and somatization: how do they relate?

Anxiety, emotions and somatization: how do they relate?

March 28, 2024

Anxiety and emotional disorders have curious and diverse ways of showing up before us, many of which are not usually interpreted as such sometimes even if a specialist is indicating it to us.

Headaches, in the abdomen, in the back, in the arms and legs, in the joints, in the chest ... Nausea, dizziness, vomiting, ulcers, diarrhea ... Difficulty swallowing, difficulty breathing, skin changes, aphonia, memory loss ... blindness, deafness ...

How does our body react to anxiety?

Logically, when our body shows any of the aforementioned problems, the first must always be to discard a physical origin; but, What happens when medical examinations do not find a cause for this symptomatology?


It is quite common in our social environment to identify the origin of headaches, muscle contractures, or exhaustion as the consequences of a person's exposure to a significant level of stress or because of a depressed mood.

However, there are many more physical symptoms that may reveal that an individual is experiencing a high degree of anxiety or may even be experiencing a depressive episode.

Somatizations and their symptoms

According to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), one of the most prestigious international diagnostic manuals, published by the American Psychiatric Association, all the symptoms described in the previous paragraph, and still others, may appear in a somatoform disorder , that is, a disorder that is characterized by the appearance of physical symptoms but whose origin is not in any organic alteration, but are due to a series of psychosocial problems, which are externalized somatically.


It is estimated that approximately between 25% and 75% of visits to the primary care physician are actually due to various somatoform disorders. However, it is also common that many of these patients do not accept that the origin of their discomfort is not found in any organic disease, so their adherence to treatments is usually low.

The Spanish Society of Psychiatry said in 2015 that somatoform disorders had a prevalence of 28.8% , only overcome by affective disorders (35.8%), and closely followed by anxiety disorders (25.6%).

Prevention of anxiety and emotional management

It seems evident that inadequate management of anxiety or a deficit in the regulation of emotions may be at the basis of somatization. And this seems to be one of the great evils of our time.


As a general rule, people learn to cope with frustrations and stressful events as they grow into adulthood; from the youngest age, Children have to face their emotional development, their socialization process , and the formation of their identity and self-esteem.

In this way, you learn that you do not always get what you want, that I can not always do what I like, that I have to share affections, spaces and objects, that I have to strive to achieve what I want, that I have to trust. myself to believe that I can fulfill my objectives, and progressively assume that I have to comply with a series of norms that are mostly imposed, but that I finally understand as necessary to obtain a certain harmony when I live with other individuals.

Tools to overcome the demands of daily life

However, the obstacles do not stop appearing when we learn to avoid them, nor do frustrations subside when we learn to tolerate them; In fact, adult life is usually a hard road in which stressful life events often occur and not a few situations in which our goals are in danger or not reached.

If the evolutionary development at the socio-emotional level has facilitated the acquisition of tools to fit stressful situations and to tolerate frustrations (loss of employment, breakup of couple, suffering from a serious illness, traffic accident, loss of a loved one, difficulty in reconciling personal, work and family life, failure to meet vital expectations, difficulty adapting to new situations ...), people often go out and keep moving forward, although occasionally they need professional help in a timely manner.

But if, on the contrary, these tools were not acquired at the time, then there will be no capacity to tolerate frustration successfully, nor will there be abilities to manage emotions, so that the first major obstacle that is presented is very likely to appear. anxiety, and if it is not properly controlled, a pattern of avoidance or paralysis that will lead inevitably to the suffering of a psychological disorder .

Treatment

Treating somatization problems is difficult because, as we pointed out previously, Many of the people who suffer from it enroll in the fact that their symptoms, being physical, must have a physical cause .

Other individuals are reluctant to allow themselves to be intervened by a Psychology professional, and end up by being chronic users of anxiolytics and antidepressants, or by going relatively frequently to the pain units; but the truth is that their problems do not improve, although pharmacology relieves them in the short term.

It is evident that psychotherapy is the most useful alternative, perhaps complemented by a pharmacological treatment that acts on the physical symptoms, since it allows the person to understand what and why their somatic discomforts occur in the absence of an organic origin.

Work on the cause of anxiety, on the cognitive schemes that are involved in the perception of stressful situations, facilitate stress coping strategies, relaxation techniques, skills to more effectively manage emotions, promote positive self-esteem. Of course it supposes more effort and time for who suffers the somatization, but what doubt is that it is more effective to influence what generates the physical symptoms than simply to act indefinitely on them as short-term relief, and that never ends up solving the problem real.


Somatization मन की परेशानी - शरीकी लक्षण in Hindi - Dr Rajiv Sharma (March 2024).


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