Irritability—a Symptom of Anxiety

Analise Benevides-unsplash

Discover how irritability can be a hidden sign of anxiety. Learn how Somatic Experiencing supports nervous system regulation and emotional resilience.

What anxiety is really for

Honestly, your anxiety isn't going anywhere. It is here to stay. The thing is, like it or not, you need it. Anxiety is hard-wired into your nervous system. Not just your nervous system, but everyone's nervous system. It is part of the original equipment. It's there for a reason. Anxiety is part of the oldest survival systems in the body. It is there to save you. It's there to save your ass every day. Every Single Day. Oh, boy!

Survival wiring: why the most anxious survived

Shannon Vandenheuvel -unsplash

When I talk about the healthy function of anxiety with clients, I talk about survival. Literally. In our earliest days as a species we had to determine what was safe and what wasn't. Which plants were  safe to eat. Which people were safe to interact with. Which snakes and insects were poisonous. What water was safe to drink. We needed  to be alert to our environment. Constantly. Ready to run. Fight. Flee. Freeze. Hide. Our survival depended on it.

Vigilance  was key to surviving in a dangerous, rugged, inherently violent world. Anxiety, manifesting as fear in our bodies, alerted us to danger, fueled our bodies with adrenaline, and sped us on our way, out of danger. Believe me, the most anxious among us were the most likely to succeed at the Survival Game, most likely to live long enough to breed, most likely to rear their children into sexual maturity, most likely to foster the next generation. The Anxious Survived. The anxious survived and we are the happy result. Are you feeling it?

When anxiety overruns its job description

Ben White-unsplash

So, your anxious experience is a function of your survival systems and it's there to keep you safe. Fine. Good. But anxiety was never designed to run your life. When anxiety is doing a lot more than keeping you aware of your environment and thoughtful about your decisions and actions, chances are it is getting out of hand. If your anxious responses within your mind and body are  now running your life, running you into the ground, keeping you in a state of high anxiety, stress, rumination, and fear, then it is no longer in service to you. It's time to bring your anxiety to heel.

Irritability—the anxiety symptom nobody talks about

Most of us are generally familiar with the symptoms of over-functioning anxiety. Racing thoughts. Racing heart beat, sweaty palms, non-stop worry or rumination, negative thinking, over-functioning, nervousness, agitation, panic, social anxiety, sleep disruption, demanding and very uncomfortable physical sensations. Life disruption.

We are typically less familiar with the other ways anxiety comes on board to run the show. Controlling behaviors, all or nothing black and white thinking, disruptions in our ability to form healthy attachments and be present and emotionally intimate with those we value most. Overextending ourselves across multiple areas of life. Lack of boundaries with ourselves and others. Feeling taken for granted. Feeling martyred, exhausted, angry, and misunderstood. Sometimes we can become demanding, requiring others accommodate our anxious needs. As that rigid self-control some of us value so highly, starts to flag, we can become irritable and edgy. Needing space to recenter, and perhaps even not realizing it, we move into irritability. Quick to react. Quick to snarl. Quick to lash out.

Arif Riyanto-unsplash

Chronic worry can make us demanding, reactive, and exhausted

Those of us suffering with over-active anxiety (and imaginations), are some of the brightest, nicest, most helpful and capable people you can meet. And some of the most persistent, irritating, irrational people on the planet. Sorry. True story. When we are out of balance in coping with our well-meaning anxious selves, we can become demanding, reactive, and irritable. When things have finally gotten on our last nerve, we brim over and we can get snappish. All of us Anxious Folk can go there, particularly teens and men. Irritable. Dysregulated.

Why teens and men often mask anxiety with anger

Karina Tess—unsplash

While all of us, male and female, who are working through our anxious experience may move into irritability at times, irritability can be a pronounced symptom for some men and teens. Why does this make sense to me? For one thing, our teens are less able to cope with their overwhelming sensations of anxiety and the many concerns they hold. Your teen may not be moved to or able to confide in you, particularly your sons. They may place a high value on the important developmental tasks of individuating and taking life on on their own, they keep it to themselves. "I'll figure it out!" In so doing, their resulting irritability may voice what they are not able or willing to give words to. In the case of teens, those monosyllabic responses can be concealing all kinds of unrecognized and unvoiced worries and concerns, as well as their general hormonal moodiness.

The fact is, our teens don't have enough life experience yet to  always be able to know what they need from us or the world around them. The transition from child to teen to adult is an arduous and demanding task to negotiate. And it is constantly changing. Your teen is navigating a world that didn't exist for you. There's a lot going on in their lives and you are a safe enough whipping post when they are overwhelmed and anxious.

Boys need emotional tools, not “toughen-up” lessons

Marina Hanna—unsplash

Although things are changing in our culture, there is still not enough support for men and boys to notice and express what is going on for them. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we parent boys, from infancy forward, differently than girls. Requiring them to toughen up, responding to them more slowly than we respond to the needs of baby girls. Telling ourselves, "He's such a boy!"
I still run into young men who have been told as children not
to cry, to suck it up.

Recent studies have suggested baby boys actually arrive more sensitive to their environments, more easily negatively impacted by experiences in the early months of life than girls. They need more support, not less. All children need support in learning how to appropriately self-soothe and self-regulate. All children require emotionally present and responsive care givers. All children need encouragement to identify and express their feelings in a healthy, fluid fashion. All children need the opportunity and modeling that allows them to identify their own needs and desires and to ask for support. All children need support and nurturing such as this. All children. Yet, historically, boys have received less of these specific relational and emotional supports. We often default, even unconsciously, to socializing and nurturing boys into silence and stoicism. A false expression of strength. And here in the West, we socialize children, and especially boys, towards individualism. Independence. Autonomy. There's not always much room to learn how to ask for help when needed, how to sort through our feelings, even the sad and bad ones, how to draw on community.

Disconnection fuels anxiety—connection is the antidote

Justin Follis-unsplash

I find men in my practice are anxious to connect. Longing for deeper connections with each other and the people they love. Working to learn. Often, my male clients are working hard to overcome their own beliefs about what it means to be a man in our culture, what it means to feel connected to oneself, what it means to reevaluate what strength truly is. We are working on shame. Guilt. Grief. Loneliness. Allowing sadness to come through and resolve. They are figuring out that disconnection, overriding and stuffing their feelings has led to isolation, anxiety, depression, and a loss of the connection they are so hungry for. This is true for everyone. In many ways, though, men have been largely left on their own to figure this out. Back in the day, and still in some circles, it is counter cultural for men to long for more connection and expression in life.

Modern life overloads an ancient nervous system

We are built for connection. We were designed to be with one another, even the more introverted of us. We were designed to sleep in a puppy pile and have each other's backs. It's part of our innate wiring. We've talked about how healthy, adaptive, appropriate anxious survival responses within our bodies were and are an essential aspect of our ability to survive and thrive on the planet. Yes, this was required. But our sense of connection to one another has always been primary. We developed in family groups of 500 to 1500 where everyone knew everyone. We survived because of these connections, because we were not left to manage on our own, because survival required a group effort and many helpers, many hands, many eyes on the horizon, many people to shoulder the work. Many hearts. We survived together. To be left on your own was a literal death sentence.

Somatic Experiencing and online therapy can calm irritability

Allison Shaw-unsplash

Our nervous systems were not designed for modern life. Life, today, is alien to our actual way of being. You were not designed to hurtle down the road at 65 mph, plugged into a 24/7 world wide crisis-oriented news cycle, largely divorced from the restorative practices of our ancestral communities (deep connection, communal meals, dancing, music, singing, story telling, mentoring, working together, multi-generational and communal child-rearing networks). And yet, here we are. Adrift in the over-stimulating sea of modernit and chaos.

We can't change the world. We can change our personal habits, practices, and ways of being. We can focus on reconnecting to ourselves, reconnecting to our family systems, learning how to be more vulnerable and trusting of each other. We can work through our anxious habits and responses and create deeper levels of satisfaction, ease, and connectedness in our lives. We can know ourselves and one another better, on a deeper level. We can stop working so hard to hold it all in. We can create and learn healthy, productive ways for expressing our emotions and needs. Communicating better. Feeling better. And, yes, feeling less irritable. It's a process. And one worth learning.

I help people who feel bad feel better. Let’s talk. Learn about online anxiety therapy in California.