How Your Mind Affects Your Feelings of Anxiety and Stress
By Andrea Gibbs
Do you ever find yourself struggling to stay focused, on task, and calm during stressful situations? When you feel stressed out, your body is flooded with chemicals that negatively affect your mind. These chemicals and the thoughts they can create lead to a full-blown racing mind that makes it nearly impossible for you to feel calm.
Stress, anxiety, and other emotions alter how your mind works. In turn, how you feel and your brain functions are essential because it directly affects the thoughts and feelings that come across your outward expression.
However, people engage in a lot of counterproductive thinking that can ultimately lead to more anxiety and stress, affecting their thoughts and emotions. Everyone falls victim to bad brain chemistry at one point, but what if you could change that?
By learning how your thoughts and feelings affect stress, anxiety, and happiness—and understanding how these factors are connected to what you think about yourself—you can learn to combat negative emotions.
Why does Stress Affect Your Thoughts and Emotions?
It’s hard to think about how stress affects our thoughts, but it does. We tend to focus more on negative thoughts than positive ones. These thoughts become a vicious cycle causing negative stress and anxiety.
On the other hand, negative thoughts can cause stress and anxiety because we begin to think something is wrong. We may feel anxious. This can lead you to want to do certain things to express your worry. Thoughts such as “I am overwhelmed” or “I can’t do this” might be running through your head, causing you to feel stressed out.
These often associated actions with stress can lead to negative pressure because even thinking about the negative feelings associated with the stress can trigger those feelings. While you may be focused on how stressful something is, you are also focusing on how much of a problem it is for you. When this occurs, your thoughts become tangled, and your emotions can spiral out of control.
Reasons Your Thoughts Can Make You Feel Stress
Many factors affect your thoughts and emotions, causing stress, anxiety, and depression. These include the following:
1. Your environment:
Your environment is a big part of what can cause you to feel anxiety, stress, and depression. When you are surrounded by conflict and negativity, it can be very hard on your mental health. This could be at work, at home, or even with friends. This is caused by the following:
• Peer pressure.
A group of people may pressure you into being a certain way, which changes how you feel. When you are around negative or anxiety-inducing people, you may begin to adopt their behavior and start thinking negatively.
• Work.
It is common for people to be overwhelmed at work, resulting in stress, anxiety, and depression. Feeling overwhelmed at your job or under the control of your boss can be distressing; it can throw your mind into a negative spin, causing you more anxiety and stress.
• Money.
Money problems are known to cause undue stress on couples and families when the financial situation is bad, or one person in the household doesn’t make enough money for the bills. Other people may also suffer from debt overspending due to high credit card balances.
2. Your mood:
Your mood greatly contributes to your stress, anxiety, and depression. The journey through life has its ups and downs; however, it can be quite depressing when you don’t feel like your life has a purpose. Several factors can contribute to this feeling, such as:
• Self-esteem issues.
If you don’t like yourself or feel like you have no purpose, it can lead to depression and even suicide. These issues can cause undue stress on your mind due to the negative thoughts that come in when you think about these things. When you focus on the negative aspects of yourself, issues like depression can spiral out of control.
• Lack of motivation.
It is hard to be happy or productive when you don’t have a real reason to get out of bed every day. Think about when you are motivated by something and when you feel depressed or stressed out. Those times will often correlate with a lack of motivation. Your attitude towards those things can affect your stress, anxiety, and depression levels as well.
3. Your physical health:
Your body’s physical health can also cause stress, anxiety, and depression. The following factors can cause these issues:
4. Sleep.
If your body is not getting the proper amount of sleep, you may have issues with anxiety, stress, and depression. Poor sleep can cause you to feel moody and cranky, making issues such as anxiety or depression more difficult to deal with. When you feel unproductive at work or school because of a lack of sleep, it can also affect everything around you.
• Obesity.
Obesity can cause your body to have trouble digesting food, leading to high blood pressure and discomfort in your joints. People who are obese may have a hard time sleeping due to the amount of weight they have. When you are tired or you are not feeling well physically, it can affect your stress, anxiety, and depression levels as well.
• Illness.
Any issues that could make you feel stress, anxiety, and depression can cause a lot of physical discomforts as well. Common illnesses that can cause these symptoms include heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other serious diseases. When something like this happens, it can also affect your mind.
It is important not to keep all of your problems bottled up inside. Letting some of the issues out will allow them to be dealt with properly, and you won’t struggle as much with stress and anxiety.
4. How you feel about yourself:
How you feel about yourself can also cause undue stress and anxiety, leaving you depressed or stressed out. This is often a reflection of your mind at the moment. Here are some of the things that can make you feel this way:
• Poor self-image.
You may have a poor self-image or low expectations for yourself. When this happens, negative thoughts about yourself will affect your feelings and cause stress.
You may have a poor self-image or low expectations for yourself. When this happens, negative thoughts about yourself will affect your feelings and cause stress.
• Not being able to reach your goals.
If there are things that you always want to improve or get better at, but your beliefs state that you aren’t capable of doing so, it can make you feel self-conscious. You may feel like you aren’t good at anything or you won’t be able to do what you want to do in life.
• Unhappiness.
You might feel unhappy about something in your life. It could be a personal problem or an interpersonal issue. When you have unhappiness, it can make it hard for you to be happy and cause stress.
Takeaway
When you are feeling stress and anxiety, it is always a good idea to try and find out the root cause of these problems. This will allow you to figure out the best way to combat them, hopefully improving your life.
You can find out what is causing the stress by taking a step back and trying to identify why you feel this way. Doing this will help to get you back on the right track and help prevent anxiety, stress, and depression from ruining your life. When you start looking at these issues more positively, you may also feel better about yourself.
Author Bio
Andrea Gibbs is the Content Manager at SpringHive Web Design company, a firm that offers web design services, maintenance, and Internet marketing. She specializes in content marketing, social media, and SEO. She is also a blog contributor at Hanei Health Solutions, a mental health care center, where she writes about topics that relate to mental health and the medical field. When she’s not writing or working, she enjoys spending time with her family and friends. Andrea is also an avid reader and loves to travel!
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect all or some of our beliefs and policy. Any links on this page do not necessarily mean they have been endorsed by Defying Mental Illness.
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