Stereo typical behaviors of anxiety sometimes eclipse subtle or different forms that can happen.  Facebook shared a few suggestions. (If whoever owns the picture objects and wishes me to take it down, I will do so.  I hope, however, you allow it to stay to help others. I did a search but couldn’t find the source material.)

Anxiety in the online medical dictionary:

Anxiety  http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Anxiety

Anxiety

Definition

Anxiety is a multisystem response to a perceived threat or danger. It reflects a combination of biochemical changes in the body, the patient’s personal history and memory, and the social situation. As far as we know, anxiety is a uniquely human experience. Other animals clearly know fear, but human anxiety involves an ability, to use memory and imagination to move backward and forward in time, that animals do not appear to have. The anxiety that occurs in posttraumatic syndromes indicates that human memory is a much more complicated mental function than animal memory. Moreover, a large portion of human anxiety is produced by anticipation of future events. Without a sense of personal continuity over time, people would not have the “raw materials” of anxiety.

It is important to distinguish between anxiety as a feeling or experience, and an anxiety disorder as a psychiatric diagnosis. A person may feel anxious without having an anxiety disorder. In addition, a person facing a clear and present danger or a realistic fear is not usually considered to be in a state of anxiety. In addition, anxiety frequently occurs as a symptom in other categories of psychiatric disturbance.

Description

Although anxiety is a commonplace experience that everyone has from time to time, it is difficult to describe concretely because it has so many different potential causes and degrees of intensity. Doctors sometimes categorize anxiety as an emotion or an affect depending on whether it is being described by the person having it (emotion) or by an outside observer (affect). The word emotion is generally used for the biochemical changes and feeling state that underlie a person’s internal sense of anxiety. Affect is used to describe the person’s emotional state from an observer’s perspective. If a doctor says that a patient has an anxious affect, he or she means that the patient appears nervous or anxious, or responds to others in an anxious way (for example, the individual is shaky, tremulous, etc.).

Everyone has it to some degree and everyone experiences it differently.  One of the problems of dissociation is the ability to mask or hide anxiety from myself and others.  One of the challenges I face is recognizing my anxiety reaction.  Part of my anxiety response is eating sugar also self neglect.  My therapist would ask me how much sleep I was getting.  Less sleep meant more anxiety.  It wasn’t that the lack of sleep caused the anxiety; it was the other way around, my anxiety caused me to lose sleep.  I am still working out what anxiety looks like to me.  I spent years hiding from how I felt.  Acknowledging that I am feeling anxious is the first step to finding answers as to what I can do about the anxiety I am feeling.