What can stress and anxiety cause? It can cause much more than you think. Our unconscious never sleeps. It runs tapes in the background when we are not even aware of it. Stress over work, money, family or a relationship can cause all kinds of physical damage to our bodies. I should know, stress over money and work caused muscles in my body to start to twitch. This started happening in the middle of the night after getting up to do what 60 year old men have to do in the middle of the night. After getting back in bed, my calves would start to twitch like crazy keeping me up. This was enough to cause me to visit my doctor who said I needed to see a neurologist to make sure I didn’t have ALS. Wonderful! Now that this sensitive doctor put the disease ALS in my head, I had something new to worry about. I couldn’t get into see a neurologist for 2 months. Now, the twitching started happening all over my body. This turned into insomnia. I was only sleeping 3-4 hours per night.  By the time I was able to visit my neurologist, I was a nervous wreck.  The neurologist did a basic screening and told me, you don’t have ALS, you have Benign Fasciculation Syndrome which means, your muscles twitch for some unknown neurologic reason, most commonly brought on by stress. He said to go see my primary care physician. By the way, I have a new PCP. The old one retired and his bedside manner stunk anyway.

All of this now turned into anxiety and panic attacks of which I have never had. My old doctor prescribed Ativan to help me sleep and for the panic attacks during the day, but being on this is not a long term solution, believe me. My new doctor has me on Cymbalta, a SNRI.  It takes about 6 weeks for this medicine to kick in, but it is finally working, allowing me to feel like a normal person. No, the twitching has not stopped, it has slowed down though. I’m hoping that it all goes away eventually as it is really annoying and causes my muscles to cramp after exercising.

This is what can happen with stress. Some people get high blood pressure, heart issues or headaches. If we ignore stress, we may think that it’s no big deal, but those tapes in the background keep playing and these tapes cause synapses in our brain to change. Those changes can cause all kinds of physical issues. Don’t ignore or try to push the stress under the rug. You have to find a way to remove the cause of the stress in your life or find some way to deal with it in a healthy manner.