Difficulty Talking, Speaking, Moving Mouth and Tongue Anxiety Symptoms

Causes

Anxiety can cause difficulty speaking for several reasons. For example:

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 and how we feel.

Many of the stress response changes can cause difficulty speaking. For instance, the stress response:

• Stimulates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), increasing nervous system activity to be more sensitive and reactive to danger. Heightened SNS activity can adversely affect muscle movement and coordination, including the muscles that control the mouth and speaking.

• Increases activity in the amygdala (the brain’s fear center) and decreases activity in the pre-frontal cortex (the executive function area of the brain) so that our attention is focused on the threat and away from thoughts that could be distracting. Reduced executive function – higher-level cognitive processes that enable us to control and coordinate our thoughts and behaviors – can impair thinking and speaking.

• Tightens muscles to make the body more resilient to injury, including the muscles that control mouth movement.

• Shunts blood to the brain to increase emergency awareness and reactivity, which can cause executive function cognitive impairment.

• Stress hormones affect other hormones, which can impact cognitive processing and brain function, causing difficulties in thinking and speaking.

Any combination of stress hormone changes can cause difficulty speaking.

The degree of stress response is proportional to the degree of anxiety. The more anxious you are, the more dramatic the stress response and impact it has.

Anxious behavior is a common cause of acute speaking difficulties.

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.

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 speaking difficulties, hyperstimulation can cause chronic difficulty speaking symptoms.

As long as the body is hyperstimulated, even slightly, it can cause symptoms of any type, number, severity, frequency, duration, and at any time.

But that’s not all. Hyperstimulation can cause difficulty speaking in other ways, too. For instance, hyperstimulation can cause:

• Nervous System Excitation and Dysregulation: An excited and dysregulated nervous system can act erratically, causing all kinds of coordination, cognitive processing, and muscle movement symptoms. Difficulty speaking, talking, walking, grabbing, holding, moving, physically reacting to stimuli, and experiencing many other odd and bizarre symptoms often occur when the nervous system is dysregulated.

• 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 system (which includes the brain), causing thinking, coordination, and muscle movement problems, all of which can cause problems with speaking.

• Hormone changes: Hormones play a crucial role in homeostasis and many bodily functions, which can affect the nervous system, leading to problems such as difficulty speaking.

• Fatigue: Hyperstimulation can cause the mind and body to become fatigued, causing coordination, thinking, and concentration problems, and problems forming and vocalizing our thoughts.[5][6] Tiredness can impair our ability to reason and function like being impaired by alcohol.[7] Just as we can slur and mispronounce words when under the influence of alcohol, we can have similar difficulty speaking when tired. Recent studies have found that being tired can impair our motor skills, causing coordination, reaction time, and judgment problems.[8][9]

• Change in brain function: Hyperstimulation can cause the brain to function abnormally, which can cause speaking problems. For example, hyperstimulation can negatively affect the brain’s learning, memory, and rationalization areas, which can cause concentration, memory, thinking, and coordination problems.[10][11] This combination of problems can interfere with our ability to think and speak.

Hyperstimulation is a common cause of chronic problems with speaking.

3. 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
• Hyper and hypoventilation
• Low blood sugar
• Nutritional deficiencies
• Dehydration
• Hormone changes
• Pain

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