How to get the anxiety out of my chest?

[nitrogenous]

Hello everyone, recently, I've developed severe anxiety that I haven't really encountered before, in which, my chest would feel very heavy and "trapped" and my head would feel very hot and flush. I used to have huge social anxiety, but I managed to overcome that in 2024. Since then, anxiety hasn't been part of my main diagnosis.

However, lately, I'm just really feeling the physical manifestation from anxiety a lot. It's not even about being socially anxious, but I'm just anxious about everything (or even nothing) and it's really overwhelming as I don't know what I can do to help myself with this. The anxiety is not just targeted to a specific problem, hence why I think when I could previously handle this through problem solving, this doesn't work anymore. I think perhaps, this is also because of rumination of the past and overthinking about the future and overwhelmness of the present.

Does anyone has any tips at all? This has also severely impacted my appetite, hydration, sleep and mood. I also get heavy tremors and nausea and because I'm too stressed, my blood vessels even constrict a lot (even making me fail my blood test 6 times in a row)…

Thank you in advance.

 

[fleshpuppet]

Beta blockers are your best bet in terms of suppressing physical symptoms. For treating the underlying anxiety, assuming its not lifestyle related, you could try therapy and/or SSRI/SNRIs. Benzodiazepines are very effective due to their anxiolytic and sedative effects, but they inhibit cognitive function and have a worse long term risk profile, so I wouldn't recommend it unless the aforementioned treatments don't work for you.