Shaking and Tension
As with blushing and sweating anxiety symptoms, shaking and jerky movements are caused by the increased sympathetic nervous system activity that occurs when we get anxious. During this process adrenaline is released that causes our muscles to become ready for physical activity. A side effect of this readiness is trembling or shaking. In addition to shaking, sufferers may also experience muscle tension. This tension can cause us to have uncoordinated clumsy movements that do not flow as naturally as they normally would. During very strong anxiety individuals may also experience involuntary jerks or spasms due to this muscle tension.
Shaking
The shaking some people experience during anxiety is usually most noticeable in the hands. Since social anxiety sufferers are often very self-conscious about others noticing their anxiety this can be a problem. Wobbling teacups, peas jumping off forks and shaking speech notes all make anxious shaking more visible and this can lead to sufferers avoiding these things when around other people. Shaking legs and quivering lips are also common visible symptoms.
The main worry of sufferers is that people will see their visible anxiety symptoms and then make a unfavourable judgement about them. The feared judgements will typically be that the sufferer is weird because of their odd movements or that they are weak because they are feeling anxious.
People will often do their best to try and hide their anxious shaking, but this tends to only worsen the situation. Anxiety sufferers are nearly always caught in vicious cycles where the ways they try to manage their anxiety only serves to worsen it. Fears about starting to shake in front of people leads to increased worry about the onset of shaking. This worry then increases anxiety levels during social situations which in turn leads to the actual shaking they are trying to avoid. Self-consciousness is increased because of this visible shaking which leads to more worry and more anxiety and more shaking creating a distressing vicious cycle.
In addition to this, sufferers will try to hide or control their anxious shaking, but this only adds fuel to the fire. A common strategy is to tense up to try and keep movements still, but this increased muscle tension only exaggerates the shaking. Another strategy is to try and hide shaking through avoidance or keeping hands out of sight, but this too will worsen the situation. Avoidance strategies like these reinforce the idea that we need to hide these symptoms and that revealing them could have negative consequences for us. They prevent us from finding out that, most of the time, revealing our anxiety will nearly always have no negative consequences for us and that doing so will prevent the anxiety from occurring in the first place.
Tension
Jerky uncoordinated movements resulting from anxious tension can cause social anxiety sufferers to find it difficult to move naturally. It can be harder for them to coordinate their movements and this can, in part, lead to them feeling self-conscious about the way they move. This increased self focus can then further interfere with coordination because it reduces their awareness of the space around them. For example, a suffer may be feeling self-conscious about how they are acting and then end up knocking over their drink. They become so distracted by their anxious thoughts that they are less aware of the objects around them and accidents are more likely to happen. An accident such as spilling a drink can feel very embarrassing for a social anxiety sufferer and this can mean more even anxiety and distress which can further interfere with they ability to function well in social situations.
As with shaking, often the very things we do to try and improve unnatural anxious movements tend to only serve to worsen them. Over the years I have heard many social anxiety sufferers report feeling self-conscious about the way they walk. They worry that other people think they are walking an odd way and have trouble moving naturally when other people are watching them.
This was also my experience, especially when walking in the streets around the general public. I used to worry that people would be making fun of the way I walked and would possibly laugh at me or think that I was odd. My strategy to deal with this at the time was a logical but unhelpful one. I used to make a conscious effort to walk more naturally. The problem was that natural movements come from unconscious behaviour, rather than conscious behaviour, and therefore rather than improving my walk, I only made my tense anxious movements even more uncoordinated and unnatural.
With all anxiety symptoms, including blushing, sweating, shaking and tension, they all disappear once the vicious cycles that keep them going are adequately broken and new ways to feel confident are learnt. In the product I am producing I will explain these vicious cycles in more detail and clearly show how to overcome them and gain that all important confidence.
Please note that shaking, muscle spasms and other physical symptoms mentioned in this article can be due to other medical conditions. If you are uncertain if your shaking relates to emotional states then you should seek the advice of a qualified medical practitioner.
How do anxiety symptoms such as shaking interfere with your life?
Tags: Jerkiness, Jerky Movements, Muscle Tension, Nervous Shaking, Quivering, Self-Consciousness, Shaking, Spasms, Tense, Trembling, Uncoordinated, Walking
February 15th, 2009 at 4:07 am
i work part-time in an indian restaurent. when i serve drinks i get the feeling i will drop it and my hands start to shake. but the problem i have is social anxiety because i start sweating and blushing when making conversations with people and almost avoid situations like these. iim always concios about what people think of me. i thought i was paronoid at first but then only came to realise i was suffering from social anxiety. this is affecting my life in many ways. i am at university at the moment. i know i can get somewhere in life but not if i carry this illness. when i have to answer the phone in front of anyone my hands start to shake because i think everyone is looking at me and then i start blushing and feeling hot. how do i overcome this problem. i have a low self-esteem around girls aswel. i want to be who i realy want to be inside my heart but why does it seem impossible. i would love to hear from you. thank you.
March 1st, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Thank you for your comment. In answer to your question, ‘why does it seem impossible?’, the way social anxiety works makes things seem impossible, but this is actually a kind of illusion. You are likely very capable of doing all the things you want to do and achieve in life, but as part of our social anxiety we feel that things will likely turn out badly and that to try carries too much risk. That increased sense of risk makes us feel anxious which influences our tendency to avoid the things we would actually really like to do. People with social anxiety commonly report that when they did the things they were very anxious about, they really weren’t as bad as they thought they were. But this realisation doesn’t last long as they soon start to pick apart their experience and identify where they may have made mistakes. This then creates a new illusion that they performed badly in that situation and gave people something to be critical about. This creates a new sense of risk which increases anxiety and motivates them away from engaging in that experience again. Facing fears and fulfilling dreams seems impossible with social anxiety, but people are usually very capable of doing just that, it’s just that the increased sense of risk holds them back and stops them finding out the truth. So one way of getting through social anxiety is to smash those illusions and find out the truth – to face situations despite how you feel. This will need to involve stopping using safety behaviours which I’d recommend learning about. There’s lots of information on the internet and in the more recent Cognitive Therapy books for social anxiety about this. Some of the ones released in the 90’s are definitely lacking. I would also highly recommend looking at how you communicate with yourself and how you treat yourself when you perceive you make mistakes (and more generally). People with social anxiety are always very self-critical and this is a large part of the problem. Changes made here can have a significant impact and will help lower that increased sense of risk. I am still planning on releasing an audio product to explain all this in much more detail and with a fuller explanation of how social anxiety works and how to make progress, so watch this space!
Best wishes,
Nick
April 10th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
This is the first piece of information I have found which explains the difficulties my 15 year old daughter has been having for the past 2 years. She has been put on adult strength antidepressants and gone through the councelling process which helped for a short time, but unfortunately the up and coming end of school exams appear to have triggered almost daily attacks. Thank you for a very good and clear explanation, we will use it to help us get the treatment she needs. Also appreciate the positive message that this can be overcome. We certainly hope so.
April 27th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I have a stammer and also suffer from Social Anxiety attacks. Going out with mates and mingling with women can be very stress full, perfect example would be – being eyed up by women, then not having the balls to go up and say hello, instead start shaking and sweating like crazy!!!!, and let the opportunity past (it happens most of the times). I’ve had the stammer my whole life and have discovered my SA problem only in the last 5 years or so (work life). Like Juved posted I have problems making and answering calls in front of people, if I can I always make them from the comfort of my room. But at work it’s a different story. Its bad enough sweating and trembling around most people you come in contact with but to make a phone call with a stammer is ‘System Overload’ for a human being!. Everyday is a complete struggle, even the simplest things of ordering food, asking for cash back at the tills, making your self an appointment or just trying to make general conversation is a complete nightmare at times, I feel like I’m one of the real unlucky ones, because on the outside I look like your average Joe. But people don’t realise that inside I’m burning away with these problems of mine.
I do have a book about Cognitive behaviour and I have picked up tips from it. I’m also seeing a Speech Therapist and I’m learning new things to control my speech. But at the end of the day it’s up to me to take control of my life……
April 27th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Hi Steve,
You are absolutely right when you said it’s up to use to take control of our lives. Life is sometimes unfair and it is not our fault that we’ve become socially anxious, but now it is up to us to make the steps to have our life the way we want it.
I used to hate using the phone also. I used to jump every time I heard my phone ring and often wouldn’t answer it. I had a technical support job for a couple of years that involved making quite a few calls and every day it was a struggle to make the first one. It got easier as the day progressed, but every day I would be starting again.
It’s really good to hear you are seeing a speech therapist. I hope they are helping you take control of your stammering and it is improving. I hope you can learn to feel more confident about your-self too, regardless of whether you stammer or not.
Best wishes,
Nick