Fear Of Losing Control - Anxiety Symptoms

Causes

Medical Advisory

Talk to your doctor about all new, changing, persistent, and returning symptoms as some medical conditions and medications can cause anxiety-like symptoms.

Additional Medical Advisory Information.

1. Anxiety-Activated Stress Response

Anxious behavior, such as worry, activates the stress response, which secretes stress hormones into the bloodstream, where they travel to specific locations to immediately prepare the body for emergency action – to fight or flee. This instinctual survival reaction is often referred to as the Fight or Flight Response.[1][2]

Visit the “Stress Response” article for the many ways it can affect the body.

The stress response causes many body-wide changes, including:

• Tightens muscles so that the body is more resilient to harm, including those in the head, face, and neck.
• Shunts blood to parts of the body important for survival, such as the brain and muscles, and away from those less important, such as the skin and digestive system.
• Stimulates the nervous system, which includes certain parts of the brain.
• Heightens most of the body’s senses.
• Increases activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and others) and decreases activity in the rationalization areas of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).
• Increases a sense of “urgency to escape.”
• Heightens our sense of “doom and gloom.”

While helpful when in real danger, these sudden changes can cause an immediate intensity that can feel like you are about to lose control.

As the degree of anxiety and stress response increase, so can the intensity of feeling like you could lose control, “explode,” or “lose it.”

It's not that you will lose it or explode, but that your body has suddenly “energized in response to a perceived threat.

While this intensity can feel strong and even alarming, you don't have to fear it. It is just a sign that your body has experienced a stress response and is doing its job to protect you.

Suddenly feeling like you could lose control is a common symptom of an acute stress response.

2. Hyperstimulation

When stress responses occur infrequently, the body recovers relatively quickly from its changes. However, frequently activated stress responses, such as from overly anxious behavior, can prevent the body from completely recovering. Incomplete recovery can leave the body in a state of semi-stress-response-readiness, which we call “stress-response hyperstimulation” since stress hormones are powerful stimulants.

Hyperstimulation is also often referred to as “hyperarousal,” “HPA axis dysfunction,” or “nervous system dysregulation.”[3][4]

Visit our “Hyperstimulation” article for more information about the many ways hyperstimulation can affect the body and how we feel.

Hyperstimulation can cause the changes of an active stress response even though a stress response hasn’t been activated.

Just as an active stress response can cause acute fear of losing control, hyperstimulation can cause chronic feelings of losing control.

Hyperstimulation can cause feelings of losing control in other ways, too. For instance, hyperstimulation can cause:

• Nervous System Excitation and Dysregulation: A chronically stimulated nervous system can act erratically and cause all kinds of nervous system, sensory system, and limbic system problems, such as involuntary episodes of feeling like you could lose control.

• Homeostatic Dysregulation: Homeostasis is the body’s ability to automatically maintain a stable internal environment despite changes in the external environment. Hyperstimulation can cause homeostatic dysregulation, leading to internal regulation problems, which can affect the nervous, sensory, somatic, and limbic systems, causing involuntary episodes of feeling like you could lose control.

• Hormone changes: Hormones play a crucial role in homeostasis and many bodily functions, which can affect the nervous, sensory, somatic, and limbic systems. Since stress hormones affect other hormones, and hormones can affect thinking and mood, hyperstimulation can cause a variety of thinking and emotional symptoms, such as feeling like you could lose control.

• Sleep disruption and fatigue: Hyperstimulation can interfere with sleep and tax the body’s energy resources harder and faster than normal. Sleep disruption and fatigue can dramatically affect thinking and mood, causing involuntary episodes of feeling like you could lose control.

As long as the body is hyperstimulated, it can cause involuntary episodes of feeling like you could lose control. Hyperstimulation is the second most common cause of feeling like you could “lose control,” “explode,” or “lose it.”

Furthermore, because of hyperstimulation’s dramatic effect on the nervous system, it’s often a cause of involuntary panic attacks.

Involuntary panic attacks can cause "out-of-the-blue" spikes of intensity that can feel like you are about to "lose control, "snap," "lose your mind," or go "hysterical." Because these episodes can come out of the blue, they can be misinterpreted to mean something more than they are.

Even though it might FEEL like you are about to lose your mind, lose control, or go crazy, you won’t. The worst that can happen is that you become afraid, and that’s it. There is NO link between being fearful and losing your mind or control.

As long as the body is even slightly hyperstimulated, it can present symptoms of hyperstimulation, including feeling like you are about to “lose it,” “explode,” “lose your mind,” or go ‘uncontrollably hysterical.”

3. Overly dramatic and anxious behavior

In addition to the above, one of the most common causes of this symptom is overly dramatic behavior, such as imagining the worst.

For instance, we often become overwhelmed when we think something is too much to handle. Feeling overwhelmed can present a feeling that you could “lose control.”

Then, feeling like you could lose control can cause additional thoughts of “losing it,” “going crazy,” or “exploding,” and all of its implications (embarrassment, uncontrollably hysterical, doing something uncharacteristic, and so on). These imagined threats can trigger more stress responses, creating a vicious cycle of one fueling the other.

It’s common for over-the-top anxious behavior to fuel fear cycles:

• Anxious thinking creates stress.
• Stress increases anxious thinking.
• Increased anxious thinking creates more stress.
• Increased stress fuels anxious thinking.

And so on.

These fear cycles can spiral quickly, making everything seem worse and easily causing feelings and fears of losing control.

4. Other Factors

Other factors can create stress and cause anxiety-like symptoms, as well as aggravate existing anxiety symptoms, including:

• Medication
• Recreational drugs
• Stimulants
• Sleep deprivation
• Fatigue
• Hyper and hypoventilation
• Low blood sugar
• Nutritional deficiencies
• Dehydration
• Hormone changes
• Pain

Select the relevant link for more information.

---------- Advertisement - Article Continues Below ----------

---------- Advertisement Ends ----------