Dizziness Anxiety Symptoms

Written by Jim Folk

Medically reviewed by Marilyn Folk, BScN.

Last updated October 3, 2024

Anxiety dizziness, lightheadedness, faint, off-balance, vertigo-like, spinning, unsteady, and woozy feelings are common symptoms of anxiety disorder. Anxiety dizziness can also trigger anxiety, including anxiety attacks and panic attacks, creating a vicious cycle of anxiety causing symptoms and symptoms aggravating anxiety.

When this symptom is attributed to anxiety or stress, it’s often referred to as Chronic Subjective Dizziness (CSD) or Persistent Postural-Perceptual Dizziness (PPPD).

This article explains the link between anxiety and dizziness.

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It’s been long known that anxiety and stress cause an increase in activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and other parts of the brain) and a decrease in activity in the executive function parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).

However, this is the first time brain scans have been used to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children.

The takeaway, however, is not that the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way due to anxiety, but that the brain is responding the way it’s supposed to when we think we are in danger. This change in brain function is an integral part of the body’s survival mechanism.

We explain this change in brain function in more detail in our “Stress Response” article.

We can remedy this change by behaving calmly instead of anxiously. As we use calming behavior, the executive function parts of the brain increase in activity, and the fear center decreases. Thus, restoring our ability to regulate our emotions.

So, it’s not that we can’t regulate our emotions when we’re anxious, but a matter of learning how so that we can gain more control over our emotions when we are anxious.

Recovery Support members can read the articles “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects,” “The Rational Brain And The Emotional Brain,” and the “Natural Ways To Shift The Body Out Of ‘Emergency Mode’” in chapter 14 for more information about how anxiety changes brain function and how to regain emotional control.

You can read the press release about this research below:

Stanford study finds stronger one-way fear signals in brains of anxious kids

Signals from the brain’s fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows.

In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain’s fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, which was published April 21 in Biological Psychiatry, come from the first study to use brain scans to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children. The children studied were 10 or 11 years old, a developmental stage when vulnerability to mood-regulation disorders, such as anxiety and depression, becomes entrenched.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the nature of the signals between two parts of the brain: the amygdalae, almond-shaped nerve clusters on the right and left sides of the brain that function as its fear centers; and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in executive functions such as decision making and emotion regulation.

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“The more anxious or stress-reactive an individual is, the stronger the bottom-up signal we observed from the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This indicates that the circuit is being hijacked in more anxious children, and it suggests a common marker underlying these two clinical measures, anxiety and stress reactivity.”

Victor Carrion, MD, a co-author of the study and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, said, “This study shows that the communication between our emotional centers and our thinking centers becomes less fluid when there is significant stress. You want that connection to be strongly signaling back and forth. But stress and anxiety of a certain level seem to interrupt that process.”

Carrion is the director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program, and is the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lead authorship of the paper is shared by researcher Stacie Warren, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Yuan Zhang, PhD.

Kids react to images

The study included 45 students in a California community with predominantly low-income residents who often face high levels of adversity. All 45 children had their anxiety levels and stress responses measured using standard behavioral questionnaires. Although their exposure to stress was potentially high, none were diagnosed with mood disorders.

To test how the children’s brains responded as they were trying to regulate negative emotions, the scientists conducted functional MRI scans while the study participants looked at two types of images, neutral and aversive. Neutral images showed pleasant scenes, such as someone taking a walk, whereas aversive images showed potentially distressing scenes, such as a car crash.

The children received instructions about responding to each image. For all the neutral images and half the aversive images, they were asked to look at them and respond to them naturally, rating their emotional state on a numerical scale after seeing each one. They were asked to look at the other half of the aversive images and try to reduce any negative reactions they had by telling themselves a story to make the pictures seem less upsetting — a story such as, “This car crash looks bad, but the people in the vehicles weren’t hurt.” After the kids tried to modify their emotional reaction, they again rated their emotional state on the numerical scale.

As the researchers expected, the children reported less negative emotions after being asked to reappraise their reactions to aversive images.

Using the brain-scan data, the researchers tested the strength and direction of interactions between the amygdala, the fear center, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the reasoning center, while the children viewed the images. Although the children with different levels of anxiety and stress reactivity reported similar reductions in their negative emotions when asked to reappraise the aversive images, their brains were doing different things.

More stress leads to less control of emotional reaction

The more anxious or stressed the child, the stronger the directional signals from the right amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No such effects were seen in the reverse direction — that is, there was no increase in signaling from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with less positive initial reactions to aversive images, less ability to regulate emotional reaction in response to aversive images, and more impulsive reactions during reappraisal of aversive images. Higher stress reactivity was linked with less controlled, more impulsive reactions when reappraising aversive images, suggesting that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less able to carry out its job.

Not only do the findings reveal how the brain can be changed by anxiety, they also act as a baseline for future studies to test interventions that may help children manage their anxiety and stress responses, the scientists said.

“We need to be more mindful about intervening,” Menon said. “These results show that the brain is not self-correcting in anxious children.”

“Thinking positively is not something that happens automatically,” Carrion said. “In fact, automatically we think negatively. That, evolutionarily, is what produced results. Negative thoughts are automatic thoughts, and positive thoughts need to be practiced and learned.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are former research assistants Katherine Duberg and Sarah-Nicole Bostan; postdoctoral scholar Percy Mistry, PhD; Weidong Cai, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; former postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, PhD; and former staff researcher Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD.

This work was completed in partnership with the Ravenswood City, Alum Rock and Orchard school districts and Pure Edge Inc., which provides mindfulness curricula for children, and supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (grants EB022907, NS086085 and MH121069), the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering.

Media Contacts

ERIN DIGITALE
Tel 650-724-9175
digitale@stanford.edu

MARGARITA GALLARDO
Tel 650-723-7897
mjgallardo@stanford.edu

Anxiety dizziness lightheaded symptom description:

You feel (or suddenly feel) dizzy/lightheaded.
You suddenly feel faint, like you might pass out.
You feel off-balance, like you might fall over because of being so out-of-balance.
You feel unsteady on your feet, like you might fall because of the unsteadiness.
It feels like your head is “swimming” or spinning.
It feels like your body is floating, swaying, or levitating.
Your balance feels so unsteady that it feels like the surface you are on is moving, such as standing or walking on a boat on the water.
It feels like the floor beneath you is moving up and down or side to side, even though you are standing on a solid surface. It can even look like the surface you are standing on is moving.
It feels like your legs may not support you, you are unsteady, or it’s uncharacteristically hard to keep your balance.
It feels like the environment around you is moving, spinning, shaking, quivering, or swaying.
Others have described this sensation as a "head is swimming" feeling and that their brain is "sloshing around" in their head.
This symptom can also feel like you are seasick or drunk, and you might also feel nauseated or have an upset stomach because of the dizziness.
You might also have difficulty placing your feet because your perception of the ground or floor may seem wrong or incorrect.
It also might seem that even though you are standing on a firm floor, the floor may be vibrating or moving; the room may appear to be moving or rocking; the surroundings around you seem to be moving, shaking, rocking, or vibrating; or you might feel like your body is swaying from side to side and back and forth.
While you haven't passed out yet, you think you might. The prospect may frighten you. You might also think, "What if I pass out? What will everyone think of me?" The thought of passing out frightens you, which can cause more symptoms and fear.
This symptom can also be experienced as a dizzy/lightheaded “spell,” that is like having a sudden feeling of being dizzy/lightheaded that then disappears.
This symptom can also be characterized as having “episodes” of dizziness/lightheadedness/feeling like you are going to pass out that come and go or come and eventually ease off, even if only slightly. Even people who experience persistent dizziness/lightheadedness/feeling like you are going to pass out notice that they experience waves (episodes) of increases and decreases of this symptom.
Those who experience this symptom persistently 24/7 can also notice increases and decreases in severity associated with “waves” or “episodes” of intensity. Sometimes the intensity can increase for an extended period, such as days before the intensity eases.
Dizziness can also occur when falling asleep, when sleeping that wakes you up, and when waking up.

This symptom can:

Occur occasionally, frequently, or persistently.
Precede, accompany, or follow an escalation of other anxiety symptoms or occur by itself.
Precede, accompany, or follow a period of nervousness, anxiety, fear, and stress, or occur "out of the blue" and for no reason.
Range in intensity from slight, to moderate, to severe.
Come in waves where it’s strong one moment and eases off or subsides the next.
Occur for a while, subside, then return for no reason.
Change from day to day, moment to moment, or remain as a constant background during your struggle with anxiety disorder.
Occur when stationary, moving, rolling over in bed, and from head movements of any kind.

This symptom can seem more noticeable when undistracted, resting, trying to sleep, or waking up.

For some people, episodes of dizziness/lightheadedness can trigger anxiety and then be accompanied by an immediate stress response (or panic attack) and its resulting sensations and symptoms, such as nausea, vomiting, sweating, feeling disoriented, rapid heart rate, heart palpitations, having a sudden urge to escape, and so on.

This anxious reaction can occur for many reasons. For example:

feeling dizzy can activate the body’s postural reflex to feeling off-balance,
being surprised by the sudden off-balance feeling, which activates the body’s startle reflex,
being alarmed by the sudden dizzy spell, which sets off an episode of anxiety and the accompanying stress response,
being afraid of how bad the dizziness can get, which can trigger a stress response alarm,
becoming afraid you might pass out, which can trigger a stress response alarm, or
being afraid the dizziness is caused by an undiagnosed serious medical problem, triggering a stress response alarm.

To name a few.

All the above combinations and variations are common.

To see if anxiety might be playing a role in your anxiety symptoms, rate your level of anxiety using our free one-minute instant results Anxiety Test, Anxiety Disorder Test, or Hyperstimulation Test.

The higher the rating, the more likely it could be contributing to your anxiety symptoms, including dizziness, lightheadedness anxiety symptoms.

It’s been long known that anxiety and stress cause an increase in activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and other parts of the brain) and a decrease in activity in the executive function parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).

However, this is the first time brain scans have been used to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children.

The takeaway, however, is not that the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way due to anxiety, but that the brain is responding the way it’s supposed to when we think we are in danger. This change in brain function is an integral part of the body’s survival mechanism.

We explain this change in brain function in more detail in our “Stress Response” article.

We can remedy this change by behaving calmly instead of anxiously. As we use calming behavior, the executive function parts of the brain increase in activity, and the fear center decreases. Thus, restoring our ability to regulate our emotions.

So, it’s not that we can’t regulate our emotions when we’re anxious, but a matter of learning how so that we can gain more control over our emotions when we are anxious.

Recovery Support members can read the articles “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects,” “The Rational Brain And The Emotional Brain,” and the “Natural Ways To Shift The Body Out Of ‘Emergency Mode’” in chapter 14 for more information about how anxiety changes brain function and how to regain emotional control.

You can read the press release about this research below:

Stanford study finds stronger one-way fear signals in brains of anxious kids

Signals from the brain’s fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows.

In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain’s fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, which was published April 21 in Biological Psychiatry, come from the first study to use brain scans to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children. The children studied were 10 or 11 years old, a developmental stage when vulnerability to mood-regulation disorders, such as anxiety and depression, becomes entrenched.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the nature of the signals between two parts of the brain: the amygdalae, almond-shaped nerve clusters on the right and left sides of the brain that function as its fear centers; and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in executive functions such as decision making and emotion regulation.

Advertisement - Article Continues Below

“The more anxious or stress-reactive an individual is, the stronger the bottom-up signal we observed from the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This indicates that the circuit is being hijacked in more anxious children, and it suggests a common marker underlying these two clinical measures, anxiety and stress reactivity.”

Victor Carrion, MD, a co-author of the study and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, said, “This study shows that the communication between our emotional centers and our thinking centers becomes less fluid when there is significant stress. You want that connection to be strongly signaling back and forth. But stress and anxiety of a certain level seem to interrupt that process.”

Carrion is the director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program, and is the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lead authorship of the paper is shared by researcher Stacie Warren, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Yuan Zhang, PhD.

Kids react to images

The study included 45 students in a California community with predominantly low-income residents who often face high levels of adversity. All 45 children had their anxiety levels and stress responses measured using standard behavioral questionnaires. Although their exposure to stress was potentially high, none were diagnosed with mood disorders.

To test how the children’s brains responded as they were trying to regulate negative emotions, the scientists conducted functional MRI scans while the study participants looked at two types of images, neutral and aversive. Neutral images showed pleasant scenes, such as someone taking a walk, whereas aversive images showed potentially distressing scenes, such as a car crash.

The children received instructions about responding to each image. For all the neutral images and half the aversive images, they were asked to look at them and respond to them naturally, rating their emotional state on a numerical scale after seeing each one. They were asked to look at the other half of the aversive images and try to reduce any negative reactions they had by telling themselves a story to make the pictures seem less upsetting — a story such as, “This car crash looks bad, but the people in the vehicles weren’t hurt.” After the kids tried to modify their emotional reaction, they again rated their emotional state on the numerical scale.

As the researchers expected, the children reported less negative emotions after being asked to reappraise their reactions to aversive images.

Using the brain-scan data, the researchers tested the strength and direction of interactions between the amygdala, the fear center, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the reasoning center, while the children viewed the images. Although the children with different levels of anxiety and stress reactivity reported similar reductions in their negative emotions when asked to reappraise the aversive images, their brains were doing different things.

More stress leads to less control of emotional reaction

The more anxious or stressed the child, the stronger the directional signals from the right amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No such effects were seen in the reverse direction — that is, there was no increase in signaling from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with less positive initial reactions to aversive images, less ability to regulate emotional reaction in response to aversive images, and more impulsive reactions during reappraisal of aversive images. Higher stress reactivity was linked with less controlled, more impulsive reactions when reappraising aversive images, suggesting that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less able to carry out its job.

Not only do the findings reveal how the brain can be changed by anxiety, they also act as a baseline for future studies to test interventions that may help children manage their anxiety and stress responses, the scientists said.

“We need to be more mindful about intervening,” Menon said. “These results show that the brain is not self-correcting in anxious children.”

“Thinking positively is not something that happens automatically,” Carrion said. “In fact, automatically we think negatively. That, evolutionarily, is what produced results. Negative thoughts are automatic thoughts, and positive thoughts need to be practiced and learned.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are former research assistants Katherine Duberg and Sarah-Nicole Bostan; postdoctoral scholar Percy Mistry, PhD; Weidong Cai, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; former postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, PhD; and former staff researcher Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD.

This work was completed in partnership with the Ravenswood City, Alum Rock and Orchard school districts and Pure Edge Inc., which provides mindfulness curricula for children, and supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (grants EB022907, NS086085 and MH121069), the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering.

Media Contacts

ERIN DIGITALE
Tel 650-724-9175
digitale@stanford.edu

MARGARITA GALLARDO
Tel 650-723-7897
mjgallardo@stanford.edu

What causes anxiety dizziness symptoms?

Medical Advisory

When this symptom is attributed to anxiety or stress, it’s often referred to as Chronic Subjective Dizziness (CSD) or Persistent Postural-Perceptual Dizziness (PPPD).[1][2] There are many reasons why anxiety/stress can cause dizziness.[3] Here are some of the most common:

1. Hyperventilation and Hypoventilation[4]

Anxiety and stress can trigger a stress response, which releases stress hormones into the bloodstream. Stress hormones cause the body to change its breathing patterns from slow, deeper breaths to rapid, deeper breaths (hyperventilation) or quick, shallow breaths (Tachypnea).

When your breathing changes to either of these patterns, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the bloodstream decrease. Low levels of CO2 can cause a lightheaded, dizzy, woozy, and faint feeling, as well as a host of other anxiety-like sensations and symptoms.

Some people hold their breath or under-breathe when they are stressed or anxious causing hypoventilation (not enough oxygen). Not enough oxygen increases CO2 in the blood, which can also cause the sensations of feeling lightheaded, dizzy, woozy, and faint, as well as a host of other anxiety-like sensations and symptoms.

Hyper and hypoventilation are common causes of dizziness and feeling lightheaded.

2. Low blood sugar[5]

The body, through digestion, converts the food we eat into blood sugar (and other nutrients to help the body rebuild). Like gas for our vehicles, the body uses blood sugar for fuel.

When the body's blood sugar is within the normal range, the body performs well, and we have a healthy energy level. However, if blood sugar is allowed to drop too low (from not eating for an extended period), even low within the normal range, we can feel tired, weak, shaky, faint, and dizzy or lightheaded.

3. Tense/tight muscles[6]

Tight muscles or groups of muscles in the upper back, neck, shoulders, face, back of the head, and scalp can cause the muscle groups leading to the ear canals to tense. This tension can affect ear canal pressure. Abnormal ear canal pressure can alter the equilibrium mechanism, which can cause dizziness and lightheadedness symptoms.

4. Heat exhaustion can also cause dizziness and lightheadedness

If you are feeling faint, dizzy, and too warm, moving to a cooler and more ventilated environment can help alleviate these symptoms.

5. Stress and chronic stress (hyperstimulation) can negatively affect the nervous system, which is responsible for the body’s equilibrium[7][8]

In addition to many other tasks, the body’s nervous system is responsible for sensory information (the sensations we receive and experience), including the body’s equilibrium (sense of balance). Balance is considered a sensory system.

For example, the vestibulocochlear nerve (the nerve in the inner ear) sends balance and head position information from the inner ear to the brain, which the brain interprets.

When the nervous system is healthy, it generally does a good job of managing sensory information and providing a stable sense of balance despite our ever-changing environment (temperature, sounds, touch, and other stimuli) and body position (standing, sitting, lying, bending over, etc.).

However, when the nervous system becomes chronically stressed, it can act erratically, causing sensory and equilibrium anomalies, such as the odd sensations and feelings associated with this symptom.

And since the nervous system uses visual cues to help it establish balance, a hyperstimulated nervous system has more difficulty finding equilibrium when we close our eyes.

This is why many anxious people with dizziness and motion symptoms find their symptoms somewhat subside when focusing on a stable, distant object. This stable visual cue can help a hyperstimulated nervous system find its “balance.”

This is also why we can become somewhat “dizzy” when we watch something that is moving, when we move our head, and when we change positions – because movement and changed positions cause a hyperstimulated nervous system more difficulty establishing balance.

Moreover, a hyperstimulated visual system can have problems receiving and interpreting visual information, contributing to equilibrium problems. Episodes of dizziness and lightheadedness can occur as the body tries to establish healthy equilibrium.

More specifically, the vestibular system is intricately connected to the peripheral nervous system, specifically the vestibulocochlear nerve (cranial nerve VIII). The vestibular portion of this nerve carries sensory information from the vestibular labyrinth in the inner ear to the vestibular nuclei in the brainstem.

The vestibular nuclei in the brainstem are part of the central nervous system. They receive input from the vestibular nerve and integrate this information with input from other sensory systems like vision and proprioception.

From the vestibular nuclei, projections extend to multiple areas of the brain and spinal cord, allowing the vestibular system to influence many functions:

Cerebellum - for coordination of head/eye movements and balance

Oculomotor nuclei - for the vestibulo-ocular reflex stabilizing gaze

Spinal cord - for postural reflexes maintaining body's orientation

Thalamus - for conscious perception of head/body motion and spatial orientation

Overall, the peripheral vestibular organs transmit signals via the vestibular nerve to the vestibular nuclei, which then relay this information throughout the central nervous system to control equilibrium, spatial awareness, and coordinated movements.

Stress can affect the vestibular system in several ways:

Stress hormones like cortisol can directly impact the functioning of the vestibular system by modulating neurotransmission in the vestibular pathways of the brain. Elevated cortisol levels due to stress, especially chronic stress (hyperstimulation) can impair the transmission of balance information from the vestibular organs to the brain, creating a false sensation of movement or dizziness.

The acute stress response, triggered by vestibular symptoms like vertigo, can promote compensatory synaptic and neuronal plasticity in the vestibular nuclei and cerebellum. This plasticity helps the brain adapt and compensate for the vestibular dysfunction.

Stress activates the autonomic nervous system, releasing hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that can indirectly impact vestibular function by altering heart rate, breathing, and other physiological parameters. These changes may contribute to dizziness sensations.

Animal studies show there are neural pathways linking the vestibular nuclei to the limbic system and hypothalamus, which regulate the stress response. This bidirectional connection allows vestibular dysfunction to trigger stress, and stress to modulate vestibular processing.

In patients with persistent vestibular disorders, high levels of stress and anxiety are thought to impede adequate vestibular compensation and recovery. Conversely, reducing stress through vestibular rehabilitation may facilitate compensation.

Consequently, stress, through hormonal, neurological, and psychological mechanisms, can directly and indirectly influence how the vestibular system processes balance information, causing or exacerbating dizziness symptoms.

6. Stress hormones adversely affect neurons, causing them to misbehave[8][9]

The nervous system is primarily made up of neurons, which operate on the principles of electrochemical interaction (electricity and chemical interaction). Because of this electrochemical makeup, they can gather and transmit messages to each other. When the nervous system is healthy, neurons act and communicate normally. Normal functioning allows us to think, feel, and move normally.

However, neurons are particularly sensitive to stress hormone stimulation because of their electrochemical properties. When they become overly stimulated, they can act erratically. This erratic neurological behavior can cause many unusual sensory-based sensations and symptoms, including those associated with balance and equilibrium.

7. Stress reduces gray matter

The Central Nervous System is made up of two types of tissue: gray matter and white matter.[10]

White matter is primarily made up of axon tracts, the long spindly appendages of some brain cells. These tracts transmit the chemical signals that neurons use to communicate.

White matter is wrapped in a fatty layer called myelin, which insulates the axons and allows them to conduct signals quickly. Myelin acts like rubber insulation for electrical wires. Myelin looks white, which is how white matter got its name.

Gray matter is primarily comprised of neuronal cell bodies and non-neuron brain cells called glial cells. Glial cells provide nutrients and energy to neurons. They also help transport glucose to the brain, clean the brain of excess chemicals, and might even affect the intensity of the neuron’s communication.

Gray matter looks grey when the brain is cut open, which is how it got its name.

While the nervous system is made up of both white and gray matter, gray matter plays the most important role in allowing humans to function normally.

A healthy level of gray matter is essential for the healthy functioning of several important brain regions involved with muscle control, sensory perception, memory, emotions, speech, decision-making, and self-control.

Gray matter is particularly important for healthy cortex functioning since gray matter is mostly present in the brain's outermost layer, which is the cortex.[11]

Research has found that stress reduces gray matter, and a reduction in gray matter has been linked to PPPD.[12]

8. Sleep deprivation/fatigue[13][14]

Behaving in an overly apprehensive manner stresses the body. Chronic stress can cause the body to become overworked and tired. This can also lead to issues with sleep and fatigue, which can cause episodes of feeling lightheaded/dizzy. Many people feel lightheaded/dizzy when they are overtired.

9. Dehydration[15]

Without enough fluids, blood volume decreases, which can cause blood pressure to drop and the amount of blood and oxygen that reaches the brain to decrease. These decreases can cause dizziness and feeling lightheaded.

10. Low blood pressure[16]

Contrary to some research, anxiety can cause low blood pressure. This is particularly true if the body has become fatigued due to hyperstimulation.

While blood pressure might not always be low, it can experience low episodes as the body adjusts it up and down based on activity and rest. These adjustments can cause and aggravate episodes of dizziness.

Anxiety can contribute to low blood pressure in older people as a consequence of prolonged anxiety.[17]

11. Vagus nerve suppression[18]

The Vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve that runs throughout the body. It performs many functions, including:

Provides somatic information for the skin behind the ear, the ear canal, and certain parts of the throat.
Supplies visceral sensation information for the larynx, esophagus, lungs, trachea, heart, and most of the digestive tract.
Stimulates muscles in the pharynx, larynx, and soft palate.
Is responsible for the regulation of internal organ function, such as digestion, heart rate, and respiratory rate.
Stimulates involuntary contractions in the digestive tract.
Transmits signals of nervousness, calm, anger, or relaxation.

And so on.

The vagus nerve controls the parasympathetic nervous system and is especially sensitive to stress. Just as the Sympathetic Nervous System is activated under stress, the Parasympathetic Nervous System activates when the stressor has passed, and we begin to calm down. That calming feeling is mainly due to how the vagus nerve influences the body.

Stress inhibits the vagus nerve.[19] As stress increases, vagus nerve tone decreases. A reduction in vagus nerve tone impedes the body’s ability to calm down, reduce heart rate, and slow breathing, to name a few. Hyperstimulation profoundly affects the body (increases body stimulation, heart rate, respiration, and so on) because stress hormones suppress vagus nerve function.

Like how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work in opposition, hyperstimulation and vagus nerve function also work in opposition. When one is active, the other isn’t. Prolonged suppression of the vagus nerve will cause it to lose its healthy tone, making it more difficult to calm ourselves down.

When the body becomes fatigued due to hyperstimulation, or when our recovery efforts begin to reduce hyperstimulation and its effects, vagus nerve stimulation can slow heart rate, breathing, and reduce blood pressure. These changes can cause a dizzy feeling until the body recovers and stabilizes.[20][21]

Persistent Postural-Perceptual Dizziness (PPPD) is associated with the vagus nerve and anxiety (and depression).[18] PPPD is a form of dizziness that is considered a vestibular disorder.

As you can see, similar to point 5, chronic stress can adversely affect vagus nerve function, which can contribute to anxiety-related dizziness. This is especially true when our recovery efforts reduce hyperstimulation and its effects. Many anxiety disorder sufferers notice a dizzy feeling as their hyperstimulation diminishes. Vagus nerve stimulation can play a role for some people.

12. Migraine, Vestibular migraine, or Prodome Migraine symptoms

Migraine headaches, vestibular migraine headaches, and prodrome migraine symptoms (symptoms leading up to a migraine headache) can all cause dizziness.[22][23] Since stress is a common trigger for migraine headaches, and since anxiety stresses the body, many anxiety disorder sufferers experience migraine headaches that are accompanied by dizziness and lightheadedness.

Migraine-related dizziness can come before, during, and after a migraine headache. Also, migraine-related dizziness doesn’t have to be accompanied by the headache itself. Feeling dizzy can be the only symptom of a migraine headache for some people.

13. Medication

Many prescription medications can cause dizziness as a side effect.[24] Specific to anxiety, many psychotropic medications can cause dizziness and lightheadedness, such as benzodiazepines (Ativan, Xanax, clonazepam, etc.) and antidepressants (Prozac, Zoloft, Trazodone, etc.).

Anticonvulsants, which some doctors prescribe for anxiety and depression, can also cause dizziness and lightheadedness, such as Depakote, Neurontin, and Lyrica.

Many blood pressure and muscle relaxant medications can also cause dizziness and lightheadedness.

Also, taking multiple medications can cause dizziness.

For more information, talk with your doctor and pharmacist to see if any of the medications you are taking could be causing dizziness or lightheadedness as a side effect.

14. Vitamin deficiency

Stress, including anxiety-caused stress, can deplete the body of important vitamins and minerals if your diet isn’t sufficiently replacing them. Certain vitamin deficiencies, such as vitamin B12 and vitamin D, have been linked to dizziness.

15. Chronic pain

Chronic pain stresses the body. Chronic stress (hyperstimulation) can cause episodes of dizziness.

16. Digestive problems

Many people, including me (Jim Folk), have suspected a link between digestive problems, such as acid reflux, nausea, GERD, IBS and other digestive problems, and dizziness/lightheadedness. Unfortunately, research on this link was scarce until recently.

Some studies have found a link between digestive upset and dizziness/lightheadedness.[25][26] While the mechanism is currently speculated, these studies have found a strong correlation between digestive problems causing dizziness/lightheadedness, even though dizziness/lightheadedness can cause digestive problems.

17. Air Pressure Changes

Studies have shown that air pressure changes (up or down) stress the body. If your body is hyperstimulated, air pressure changes can aggravate your symptoms, including causing episodes of dizziness and feeling lightheaded.

It’s been long known that anxiety and stress cause an increase in activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and other parts of the brain) and a decrease in activity in the executive function parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).

However, this is the first time brain scans have been used to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children.

The takeaway, however, is not that the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way due to anxiety, but that the brain is responding the way it’s supposed to when we think we are in danger. This change in brain function is an integral part of the body’s survival mechanism.

We explain this change in brain function in more detail in our “Stress Response” article.

We can remedy this change by behaving calmly instead of anxiously. As we use calming behavior, the executive function parts of the brain increase in activity, and the fear center decreases. Thus, restoring our ability to regulate our emotions.

So, it’s not that we can’t regulate our emotions when we’re anxious, but a matter of learning how so that we can gain more control over our emotions when we are anxious.

Recovery Support members can read the articles “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects,” “The Rational Brain And The Emotional Brain,” and the “Natural Ways To Shift The Body Out Of ‘Emergency Mode’” in chapter 14 for more information about how anxiety changes brain function and how to regain emotional control.

You can read the press release about this research below:

Stanford study finds stronger one-way fear signals in brains of anxious kids

Signals from the brain’s fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows.

In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain’s fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, which was published April 21 in Biological Psychiatry, come from the first study to use brain scans to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children. The children studied were 10 or 11 years old, a developmental stage when vulnerability to mood-regulation disorders, such as anxiety and depression, becomes entrenched.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the nature of the signals between two parts of the brain: the amygdalae, almond-shaped nerve clusters on the right and left sides of the brain that function as its fear centers; and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in executive functions such as decision making and emotion regulation.

Advertisement - Article Continues Below

“The more anxious or stress-reactive an individual is, the stronger the bottom-up signal we observed from the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This indicates that the circuit is being hijacked in more anxious children, and it suggests a common marker underlying these two clinical measures, anxiety and stress reactivity.”

Victor Carrion, MD, a co-author of the study and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, said, “This study shows that the communication between our emotional centers and our thinking centers becomes less fluid when there is significant stress. You want that connection to be strongly signaling back and forth. But stress and anxiety of a certain level seem to interrupt that process.”

Carrion is the director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program, and is the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lead authorship of the paper is shared by researcher Stacie Warren, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Yuan Zhang, PhD.

Kids react to images

The study included 45 students in a California community with predominantly low-income residents who often face high levels of adversity. All 45 children had their anxiety levels and stress responses measured using standard behavioral questionnaires. Although their exposure to stress was potentially high, none were diagnosed with mood disorders.

To test how the children’s brains responded as they were trying to regulate negative emotions, the scientists conducted functional MRI scans while the study participants looked at two types of images, neutral and aversive. Neutral images showed pleasant scenes, such as someone taking a walk, whereas aversive images showed potentially distressing scenes, such as a car crash.

The children received instructions about responding to each image. For all the neutral images and half the aversive images, they were asked to look at them and respond to them naturally, rating their emotional state on a numerical scale after seeing each one. They were asked to look at the other half of the aversive images and try to reduce any negative reactions they had by telling themselves a story to make the pictures seem less upsetting — a story such as, “This car crash looks bad, but the people in the vehicles weren’t hurt.” After the kids tried to modify their emotional reaction, they again rated their emotional state on the numerical scale.

As the researchers expected, the children reported less negative emotions after being asked to reappraise their reactions to aversive images.

Using the brain-scan data, the researchers tested the strength and direction of interactions between the amygdala, the fear center, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the reasoning center, while the children viewed the images. Although the children with different levels of anxiety and stress reactivity reported similar reductions in their negative emotions when asked to reappraise the aversive images, their brains were doing different things.

More stress leads to less control of emotional reaction

The more anxious or stressed the child, the stronger the directional signals from the right amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No such effects were seen in the reverse direction — that is, there was no increase in signaling from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with less positive initial reactions to aversive images, less ability to regulate emotional reaction in response to aversive images, and more impulsive reactions during reappraisal of aversive images. Higher stress reactivity was linked with less controlled, more impulsive reactions when reappraising aversive images, suggesting that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less able to carry out its job.

Not only do the findings reveal how the brain can be changed by anxiety, they also act as a baseline for future studies to test interventions that may help children manage their anxiety and stress responses, the scientists said.

“We need to be more mindful about intervening,” Menon said. “These results show that the brain is not self-correcting in anxious children.”

“Thinking positively is not something that happens automatically,” Carrion said. “In fact, automatically we think negatively. That, evolutionarily, is what produced results. Negative thoughts are automatic thoughts, and positive thoughts need to be practiced and learned.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are former research assistants Katherine Duberg and Sarah-Nicole Bostan; postdoctoral scholar Percy Mistry, PhD; Weidong Cai, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; former postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, PhD; and former staff researcher Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD.

This work was completed in partnership with the Ravenswood City, Alum Rock and Orchard school districts and Pure Edge Inc., which provides mindfulness curricula for children, and supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (grants EB022907, NS086085 and MH121069), the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering.

Media Contacts

ERIN DIGITALE
Tel 650-724-9175
digitale@stanford.edu

MARGARITA GALLARDO
Tel 650-723-7897
mjgallardo@stanford.edu

It’s been long known that anxiety and stress cause an increase in activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and other parts of the brain) and a decrease in activity in the executive function parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).

However, this is the first time brain scans have been used to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children.

The takeaway, however, is not that the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way due to anxiety, but that the brain is responding the way it’s supposed to when we think we are in danger. This change in brain function is an integral part of the body’s survival mechanism.

We explain this change in brain function in more detail in our “Stress Response” article.

We can remedy this change by behaving calmly instead of anxiously. As we use calming behavior, the executive function parts of the brain increase in activity, and the fear center decreases. Thus, restoring our ability to regulate our emotions.

So, it’s not that we can’t regulate our emotions when we’re anxious, but a matter of learning how so that we can gain more control over our emotions when we are anxious.

Recovery Support members can read the articles “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects,” “The Rational Brain And The Emotional Brain,” and the “Natural Ways To Shift The Body Out Of ‘Emergency Mode’” in chapter 14 for more information about how anxiety changes brain function and how to regain emotional control.

You can read the press release about this research below:

Stanford study finds stronger one-way fear signals in brains of anxious kids

Signals from the brain’s fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows.

In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain’s fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, which was published April 21 in Biological Psychiatry, come from the first study to use brain scans to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children. The children studied were 10 or 11 years old, a developmental stage when vulnerability to mood-regulation disorders, such as anxiety and depression, becomes entrenched.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the nature of the signals between two parts of the brain: the amygdalae, almond-shaped nerve clusters on the right and left sides of the brain that function as its fear centers; and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in executive functions such as decision making and emotion regulation.

Advertisement - Article Continues Below

“The more anxious or stress-reactive an individual is, the stronger the bottom-up signal we observed from the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This indicates that the circuit is being hijacked in more anxious children, and it suggests a common marker underlying these two clinical measures, anxiety and stress reactivity.”

Victor Carrion, MD, a co-author of the study and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, said, “This study shows that the communication between our emotional centers and our thinking centers becomes less fluid when there is significant stress. You want that connection to be strongly signaling back and forth. But stress and anxiety of a certain level seem to interrupt that process.”

Carrion is the director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program, and is the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lead authorship of the paper is shared by researcher Stacie Warren, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Yuan Zhang, PhD.

Kids react to images

The study included 45 students in a California community with predominantly low-income residents who often face high levels of adversity. All 45 children had their anxiety levels and stress responses measured using standard behavioral questionnaires. Although their exposure to stress was potentially high, none were diagnosed with mood disorders.

To test how the children’s brains responded as they were trying to regulate negative emotions, the scientists conducted functional MRI scans while the study participants looked at two types of images, neutral and aversive. Neutral images showed pleasant scenes, such as someone taking a walk, whereas aversive images showed potentially distressing scenes, such as a car crash.

The children received instructions about responding to each image. For all the neutral images and half the aversive images, they were asked to look at them and respond to them naturally, rating their emotional state on a numerical scale after seeing each one. They were asked to look at the other half of the aversive images and try to reduce any negative reactions they had by telling themselves a story to make the pictures seem less upsetting — a story such as, “This car crash looks bad, but the people in the vehicles weren’t hurt.” After the kids tried to modify their emotional reaction, they again rated their emotional state on the numerical scale.

As the researchers expected, the children reported less negative emotions after being asked to reappraise their reactions to aversive images.

Using the brain-scan data, the researchers tested the strength and direction of interactions between the amygdala, the fear center, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the reasoning center, while the children viewed the images. Although the children with different levels of anxiety and stress reactivity reported similar reductions in their negative emotions when asked to reappraise the aversive images, their brains were doing different things.

More stress leads to less control of emotional reaction

The more anxious or stressed the child, the stronger the directional signals from the right amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No such effects were seen in the reverse direction — that is, there was no increase in signaling from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with less positive initial reactions to aversive images, less ability to regulate emotional reaction in response to aversive images, and more impulsive reactions during reappraisal of aversive images. Higher stress reactivity was linked with less controlled, more impulsive reactions when reappraising aversive images, suggesting that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less able to carry out its job.

Not only do the findings reveal how the brain can be changed by anxiety, they also act as a baseline for future studies to test interventions that may help children manage their anxiety and stress responses, the scientists said.

“We need to be more mindful about intervening,” Menon said. “These results show that the brain is not self-correcting in anxious children.”

“Thinking positively is not something that happens automatically,” Carrion said. “In fact, automatically we think negatively. That, evolutionarily, is what produced results. Negative thoughts are automatic thoughts, and positive thoughts need to be practiced and learned.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are former research assistants Katherine Duberg and Sarah-Nicole Bostan; postdoctoral scholar Percy Mistry, PhD; Weidong Cai, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; former postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, PhD; and former staff researcher Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD.

This work was completed in partnership with the Ravenswood City, Alum Rock and Orchard school districts and Pure Edge Inc., which provides mindfulness curricula for children, and supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (grants EB022907, NS086085 and MH121069), the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering.

Media Contacts

ERIN DIGITALE
Tel 650-724-9175
digitale@stanford.edu

MARGARITA GALLARDO
Tel 650-723-7897
mjgallardo@stanford.edu

How to treat dizziness associated with anxiety

For hyper- or hypoventilation

If your dizziness is caused by hyper or hypoventilation, it can be alleviated by deliberately slowing down your breathing and making yourself breathe deeper and more regular. Changing your breathing to a relaxed, slower, and deeper pattern, even for a few moments, can correct the CO2 level in the blood. As the CO2 level adjusts to a healthy range, ventilation-caused dizziness subsides.

Hyper- and hypoventilation-caused dizziness is relatively harmless (although frightening when you don’t know why it’s happening) and not a cause for concern. However, you want to become aware of your breathing patterns when stressed or anxious, then take appropriate action to manage your breathing so that you don’t hyper- or hypoventilate. Deliberately breathing slowly and more deeply will prevent hyper- and hypoventilation symptoms.

For more information about hyperventilation and hypoventilation, Recovery Support members can visit the appropriate sections in Chapter 4.

Low blood sugar

If your dizziness is caused by low blood sugar (even if it is low within the normal range), you might want to consider when you last ate. If it's been three to four hours (or more), this could be why you feel dizzy or faint. Eating (fruits, vegetables, carbohydrates, proteins) will most often alleviate these types of symptoms.

However, this could also be the reason if you've recently eaten food containing raw sugar (such as a candy bar, chocolate, pastry, etc.). Since raw sugar foods convert to blood sugar quickly, when the body experiences a sudden increase in blood sugar, it automatically takes corrective action (high blood sugar is harmful to the body, so it automatically tries to correct it) by stimulating the pancreas to release large amounts of insulin.

In an attempt to rapidly correct the problem, the pancreas can sometimes release too much insulin, pulling too much blood sugar out of the blood, resulting in a blood sugar crash that causes low blood sugar. Low blood sugar can produce symptoms of being faint, like you might pass out, mental confusion, shakiness or trembling. (If the body senses that the blood sugar is dangerously low, it will instantly produce stress hormones that can be quickly converted into blood sugar - causing us to feel a surge of energy, even to the point of panic.)

Many anxious people experience dizziness and lightheadedness if they haven’t eaten regularly.

Eating smaller more frequent meals comprised of whole and natural foods will help the body keep its blood sugar in the healthy and safe range, thereby preventing these types of symptoms from occurring.

For more information about blood sugar symptoms, Recovery Support members can visit the Blood Sugar section (in Chapter 4).

For more information about the impact of the foods we eat, Recovery Support members can visit the Nutrition section (in Chapter 22).

Heat exhaustion

If your dizziness is caused by heat exhaustion, moving to a cooler environment will lower your body temperature. As your body temperature returns to normal, your heat exhaustion-caused dizziness will subside. However, it may take some time for your body to recover from heat exhaustion.

Dehydration

If your dizziness is caused by dehydration, drinking fluids will eventually eliminate dehydration-caused dizziness. Be sure, however, not to drink too much too quickly. Sipping on one or two glasses of water will rehydrate the body.

The best way to prevent dehydration is to ensure you are getting enough fluids each day. Checking the color of your urine is a reasonable way to see if your body is sufficiently hydrated. If your urine is dark in color, your body requires more fluid. The body is typically well-hydrated when your urine is almost clear.

Sleep deprivation

If your dizziness is caused by sleep deprivation and fatigue, increasing your sleep and rest and giving your body sufficient time to regain its normal energy will eliminate fatigue-caused dizziness.

Muscle tension

If you suspect your dizziness might be caused by upper body muscle tension, doing a deep relaxation technique, such as progressive muscle relaxation, can help alleviate muscle tension.

Moreover, reducing stress, regular deep relaxation, and regular light to moderate exercise can also help reduce and eliminate upper body muscle tension. You could also try taking a warm bath, having a massage, or using an electric massager, vibrator, or massage chair.

Any activity that reduces muscle tension could allow ear pressure to return to normal and alleviate muscle tension-related dizziness.

Migraine headaches

If migraine headaches cause your dizziness, there are many ways to reduce migraine headaches, including reducing stress and avoiding your migraine headache triggers.

For anxious people, reducing stress is one of the most important factors to eliminate if you want to reduce migraine headache intensity and frequency.

Medication

If your dizziness is caused by medication, talk with your doctor about reducing your dosage, switching to a different medication, or stopping altogether, if possible. NEVER stop a medication without first talking with your doctor or pharmacist. Stopping some types of medications abruptly can cause significant harm.

Vitamin deficiency

Eating a healthy diet is the best way to ensure you aren’t deficient in specific vitamins. If you believe you are deficient in certain vitamins, you should connect with a Nutrition Science Practitioner, such as Liliana Tosic.

Digestive problems

Addressing digestive problems and symptoms could alleviate digestive-caused dizziness. Talk with your doctor or Nutrition Science Practitioner, such as Liliana Tosic.

Air Pressure Changes

While there isn’t anything you can do about air pressure changes associated with fluctuating weather conditions, reducing stress can reduce its effects on your body. This leads to the next remedies.

Active stress response

When anxiety dizziness is caused by apprehensive behavior and the accompanying stress response changes, calming yourself down will bring an end to the stress response and its changes. As your body recovers from the active stress response, this anxiety symptom should subside.

Remember, it can take up to 20 minutes or more for the body to recover from a major stress response. But this is normal and shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

Hyperstimulation

If your dizziness is caused by chronic stress (hyperstimulation), research shows that by reducing your stress and giving your body sufficient time to recover, the dysregulated nervous system can recover and return to normal vestibular function, eliminating this symptom.

However, keep in mind that it can take a long time for the body to recover once it has become chronically stressed and symptomatic.

You can eliminate hyperstimulation by:

Reducing stress.
Containing anxious behavior (since anxiety creates stress).
Regular deep relaxation.
Avoiding stimulants.
Regular light to moderate exercise.
Getting regular good sleep.
Eating a healthy diet of whole and natural foods.
Passively-accepting your symptoms until they subside.
Being patient as your body recovers.

Visit our “60 Natural Ways To Reduce Stress” article for more ways to reduce stress.

As the body recovers from hyperstimulation, it stops sending symptoms of hyperstimulation, including dizziness (lightheadedness, off-balance, unsteady, wooziness, feeling faint, etc.).

Hyperstimulation symptoms subside as the body regains its normal, non-hyperstimulated health.

However, eliminating hyperstimulation can take much longer than most people think, causing symptoms to linger longer than expected.

As long as the body is even slightly hyperstimulated, it can present symptoms of any type, number, intensity, duration, frequency, and at any time, including this one.

Even so, since dizziness is a common symptom of stress, including anxiety-caused stress, it's harmless and needn't be a cause for concern. It will subside when unhealthy stress has been eliminated and the body has had sufficient time to recover and stabilize. Therefore, there is no reason to worry about it.

Anxiety symptoms often linger because:

The body is still being stressed (from stressful circumstances or anxious behavior).
Your stress hasn't diminished enough or for long enough.
Your body hasn't completed its recovery work.

Addressing the reason for lingering symptoms will allow the body to recover.

Most often, lingering anxiety symptoms ONLY remain because of the above reasons. They AREN'T a sign of a medical problem. This is especially true if you have had your symptoms evaluated by your doctor, and they have been solely attributed to anxiety or stress.

Chronic anxiety symptoms subside when hyperstimulation is eliminated. As the body recovers and stabilizes, all chronic anxiety symptoms will slowly diminish and eventually disappear.

Since worrying and becoming upset about anxiety symptoms stress the body, these behaviors can interfere with recovery.

Passively accepting your symptoms – allowing them to persist without reacting to, resisting, worrying about, or fighting them – while doing your recovery work will cause their cessation in time.

Acceptance, practice, and patience are key to recovery.

Since the body can take a long time to recover from hyperstimulation, it's best to faithfully work at your recovery despite the lack of apparent progress.

However, if you persevere with your recovery work, you will succeed.

You also have to do your recovery work FIRST before your body can recover. The cumulative effects of your recovery work will produce results down the road. And the body's stimulation has to diminish before symptoms can subside.

Eliminating hyperstimulation will bring results in time!

Remember: Focusing on your sensations and symptoms makes them more pronounced. If you'd like to lessen their impact, learn to focus your attention elsewhere through distraction, enjoying your hobbies, undertaking pleasing and calming activities, regular deep relaxation, and by recalling pleasant memories or experiences.

Recovery Support

The Recovery Support area of our website contains thousands of pages of important self-help information to help individuals overcome anxiety disorder, hyperstimulation, and symptoms.

Due to the vast amount of information, including a private Discussion Forum, many of our Recovery Support members consider it their online recovery support group.

Join Recovery Support

Videos

Dizziness anxiety symptom - Part 1

Jim Fok's video commentary about the dizziness anxiety symptom - Part 2

Jim Folk's commentary on the dizziness anxiety symptom

Jim Folk offers tips on dealing with anxiety-caused dizziness.

It’s been long known that anxiety and stress cause an increase in activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and other parts of the brain) and a decrease in activity in the executive function parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).

However, this is the first time brain scans have been used to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children.

The takeaway, however, is not that the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way due to anxiety, but that the brain is responding the way it’s supposed to when we think we are in danger. This change in brain function is an integral part of the body’s survival mechanism.

We explain this change in brain function in more detail in our “Stress Response” article.

We can remedy this change by behaving calmly instead of anxiously. As we use calming behavior, the executive function parts of the brain increase in activity, and the fear center decreases. Thus, restoring our ability to regulate our emotions.

So, it’s not that we can’t regulate our emotions when we’re anxious, but a matter of learning how so that we can gain more control over our emotions when we are anxious.

Recovery Support members can read the articles “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects,” “The Rational Brain And The Emotional Brain,” and the “Natural Ways To Shift The Body Out Of ‘Emergency Mode’” in chapter 14 for more information about how anxiety changes brain function and how to regain emotional control.

You can read the press release about this research below:

Stanford study finds stronger one-way fear signals in brains of anxious kids

Signals from the brain’s fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows.

In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain’s fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, which was published April 21 in Biological Psychiatry, come from the first study to use brain scans to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children. The children studied were 10 or 11 years old, a developmental stage when vulnerability to mood-regulation disorders, such as anxiety and depression, becomes entrenched.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the nature of the signals between two parts of the brain: the amygdalae, almond-shaped nerve clusters on the right and left sides of the brain that function as its fear centers; and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in executive functions such as decision making and emotion regulation.

Advertisement - Article Continues Below

“The more anxious or stress-reactive an individual is, the stronger the bottom-up signal we observed from the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This indicates that the circuit is being hijacked in more anxious children, and it suggests a common marker underlying these two clinical measures, anxiety and stress reactivity.”

Victor Carrion, MD, a co-author of the study and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, said, “This study shows that the communication between our emotional centers and our thinking centers becomes less fluid when there is significant stress. You want that connection to be strongly signaling back and forth. But stress and anxiety of a certain level seem to interrupt that process.”

Carrion is the director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program, and is the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lead authorship of the paper is shared by researcher Stacie Warren, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Yuan Zhang, PhD.

Kids react to images

The study included 45 students in a California community with predominantly low-income residents who often face high levels of adversity. All 45 children had their anxiety levels and stress responses measured using standard behavioral questionnaires. Although their exposure to stress was potentially high, none were diagnosed with mood disorders.

To test how the children’s brains responded as they were trying to regulate negative emotions, the scientists conducted functional MRI scans while the study participants looked at two types of images, neutral and aversive. Neutral images showed pleasant scenes, such as someone taking a walk, whereas aversive images showed potentially distressing scenes, such as a car crash.

The children received instructions about responding to each image. For all the neutral images and half the aversive images, they were asked to look at them and respond to them naturally, rating their emotional state on a numerical scale after seeing each one. They were asked to look at the other half of the aversive images and try to reduce any negative reactions they had by telling themselves a story to make the pictures seem less upsetting — a story such as, “This car crash looks bad, but the people in the vehicles weren’t hurt.” After the kids tried to modify their emotional reaction, they again rated their emotional state on the numerical scale.

As the researchers expected, the children reported less negative emotions after being asked to reappraise their reactions to aversive images.

Using the brain-scan data, the researchers tested the strength and direction of interactions between the amygdala, the fear center, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the reasoning center, while the children viewed the images. Although the children with different levels of anxiety and stress reactivity reported similar reductions in their negative emotions when asked to reappraise the aversive images, their brains were doing different things.

More stress leads to less control of emotional reaction

The more anxious or stressed the child, the stronger the directional signals from the right amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No such effects were seen in the reverse direction — that is, there was no increase in signaling from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with less positive initial reactions to aversive images, less ability to regulate emotional reaction in response to aversive images, and more impulsive reactions during reappraisal of aversive images. Higher stress reactivity was linked with less controlled, more impulsive reactions when reappraising aversive images, suggesting that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less able to carry out its job.

Not only do the findings reveal how the brain can be changed by anxiety, they also act as a baseline for future studies to test interventions that may help children manage their anxiety and stress responses, the scientists said.

“We need to be more mindful about intervening,” Menon said. “These results show that the brain is not self-correcting in anxious children.”

“Thinking positively is not something that happens automatically,” Carrion said. “In fact, automatically we think negatively. That, evolutionarily, is what produced results. Negative thoughts are automatic thoughts, and positive thoughts need to be practiced and learned.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are former research assistants Katherine Duberg and Sarah-Nicole Bostan; postdoctoral scholar Percy Mistry, PhD; Weidong Cai, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; former postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, PhD; and former staff researcher Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD.

This work was completed in partnership with the Ravenswood City, Alum Rock and Orchard school districts and Pure Edge Inc., which provides mindfulness curricula for children, and supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (grants EB022907, NS086085 and MH121069), the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering.

Media Contacts

ERIN DIGITALE
Tel 650-724-9175
digitale@stanford.edu

MARGARITA GALLARDO
Tel 650-723-7897
mjgallardo@stanford.edu

Frequently Asked Questions

Can anxiety dizziness last all day?

Dizziness due to an episode of anxiety generally doesn’t last all day. It can last a little longer than the anxiety episode itself. Dizziness due to chronic worry or stress (hyperstimulation) can last all day or longer. This type of anxiety dizziness can last as long as the body is chronically stressed.

Is dizziness from anxiety dangerous?

As a symptom, no, dizziness from anxiety isn’t dangerous. However, you might want to be extra cautious when doing certain activities, such as driving, operating heavy machinery, getting up from a lying or sitting position too quickly, or while using the stairs.

You might also want to avoid turning your head too quickly or being in environments with a lot of motion, such as crowds or where there is heavy traffic.

So again, while anxiety dizziness itself isn’t dangerous, feeling dizzy, lightheaded, and off balance can cause problems when doing certain activities.

Can dizziness cause anxiety?

Anxiety is caused by apprehensive behavior. So, no, dizziness doesn’t cause anxiety. But dizziness can cause involuntary startle, postural reflex, and stress responses that can produce similar symptoms to anxiety. If a person doesn’t like feeling dizzy and becomes afraid of it, she might worry about feeling dizzy, which does create anxiety.

If you have become afraid of the dizziness anxiety symptom, you might want to connect with one of our recommended anxiety disorder therapists to help you overcome this fear. Since fear drives anxiety, and anxiety stresses the body, which is a common cause of anxiety dizziness, overcoming your fear of dizziness can eliminate anxiety-caused dizziness.

Working with an experienced anxiety disorder therapist is the most effective way to overcome anxiety disorder, including the many fears anxiety disorder often establishes.

For a more detailed explanation about anxiety symptoms including this one, why symptoms can persist long after the stress response has ended, common barriers to recovery and symptom elimination, and more recovery strategies and tips, we have many chapters that address this information in the Recovery Support area of our website.

NOTE: Anxiety, stress, and hyperstimulation-caused dizziness is often misdiagnosed as vertigo, benign positional vertigo (BPV), Meniere’s Disease, Labrynthitis, and vestibular neuritis. If you’ve tried the treatments associated with each condition, yet your dizziness and lightheadedness persist, your dizziness and lightheadedness may be caused by stress, including anxiety-caused stress. Therefore, you may want to seek out a medical professional who understands the connection between dizziness/lightheadedness and stress. For instance, it’s reported that psychiatric disorders appear to be the second most common cause of chronic dizziness.[10]

It’s been long known that anxiety and stress cause an increase in activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and other parts of the brain) and a decrease in activity in the executive function parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).

However, this is the first time brain scans have been used to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children.

The takeaway, however, is not that the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way due to anxiety, but that the brain is responding the way it’s supposed to when we think we are in danger. This change in brain function is an integral part of the body’s survival mechanism.

We explain this change in brain function in more detail in our “Stress Response” article.

We can remedy this change by behaving calmly instead of anxiously. As we use calming behavior, the executive function parts of the brain increase in activity, and the fear center decreases. Thus, restoring our ability to regulate our emotions.

So, it’s not that we can’t regulate our emotions when we’re anxious, but a matter of learning how so that we can gain more control over our emotions when we are anxious.

Recovery Support members can read the articles “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects,” “The Rational Brain And The Emotional Brain,” and the “Natural Ways To Shift The Body Out Of ‘Emergency Mode’” in chapter 14 for more information about how anxiety changes brain function and how to regain emotional control.

You can read the press release about this research below:

Stanford study finds stronger one-way fear signals in brains of anxious kids

Signals from the brain’s fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows.

In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain’s fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, which was published April 21 in Biological Psychiatry, come from the first study to use brain scans to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children. The children studied were 10 or 11 years old, a developmental stage when vulnerability to mood-regulation disorders, such as anxiety and depression, becomes entrenched.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the nature of the signals between two parts of the brain: the amygdalae, almond-shaped nerve clusters on the right and left sides of the brain that function as its fear centers; and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in executive functions such as decision making and emotion regulation.

Advertisement - Article Continues Below

“The more anxious or stress-reactive an individual is, the stronger the bottom-up signal we observed from the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This indicates that the circuit is being hijacked in more anxious children, and it suggests a common marker underlying these two clinical measures, anxiety and stress reactivity.”

Victor Carrion, MD, a co-author of the study and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, said, “This study shows that the communication between our emotional centers and our thinking centers becomes less fluid when there is significant stress. You want that connection to be strongly signaling back and forth. But stress and anxiety of a certain level seem to interrupt that process.”

Carrion is the director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program, and is the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lead authorship of the paper is shared by researcher Stacie Warren, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Yuan Zhang, PhD.

Kids react to images

The study included 45 students in a California community with predominantly low-income residents who often face high levels of adversity. All 45 children had their anxiety levels and stress responses measured using standard behavioral questionnaires. Although their exposure to stress was potentially high, none were diagnosed with mood disorders.

To test how the children’s brains responded as they were trying to regulate negative emotions, the scientists conducted functional MRI scans while the study participants looked at two types of images, neutral and aversive. Neutral images showed pleasant scenes, such as someone taking a walk, whereas aversive images showed potentially distressing scenes, such as a car crash.

The children received instructions about responding to each image. For all the neutral images and half the aversive images, they were asked to look at them and respond to them naturally, rating their emotional state on a numerical scale after seeing each one. They were asked to look at the other half of the aversive images and try to reduce any negative reactions they had by telling themselves a story to make the pictures seem less upsetting — a story such as, “This car crash looks bad, but the people in the vehicles weren’t hurt.” After the kids tried to modify their emotional reaction, they again rated their emotional state on the numerical scale.

As the researchers expected, the children reported less negative emotions after being asked to reappraise their reactions to aversive images.

Using the brain-scan data, the researchers tested the strength and direction of interactions between the amygdala, the fear center, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the reasoning center, while the children viewed the images. Although the children with different levels of anxiety and stress reactivity reported similar reductions in their negative emotions when asked to reappraise the aversive images, their brains were doing different things.

More stress leads to less control of emotional reaction

The more anxious or stressed the child, the stronger the directional signals from the right amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No such effects were seen in the reverse direction — that is, there was no increase in signaling from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with less positive initial reactions to aversive images, less ability to regulate emotional reaction in response to aversive images, and more impulsive reactions during reappraisal of aversive images. Higher stress reactivity was linked with less controlled, more impulsive reactions when reappraising aversive images, suggesting that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less able to carry out its job.

Not only do the findings reveal how the brain can be changed by anxiety, they also act as a baseline for future studies to test interventions that may help children manage their anxiety and stress responses, the scientists said.

“We need to be more mindful about intervening,” Menon said. “These results show that the brain is not self-correcting in anxious children.”

“Thinking positively is not something that happens automatically,” Carrion said. “In fact, automatically we think negatively. That, evolutionarily, is what produced results. Negative thoughts are automatic thoughts, and positive thoughts need to be practiced and learned.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are former research assistants Katherine Duberg and Sarah-Nicole Bostan; postdoctoral scholar Percy Mistry, PhD; Weidong Cai, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; former postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, PhD; and former staff researcher Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD.

This work was completed in partnership with the Ravenswood City, Alum Rock and Orchard school districts and Pure Edge Inc., which provides mindfulness curricula for children, and supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (grants EB022907, NS086085 and MH121069), the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering.

Media Contacts

ERIN DIGITALE
Tel 650-724-9175
digitale@stanford.edu

MARGARITA GALLARDO
Tel 650-723-7897
mjgallardo@stanford.edu

Prevalence

In online polls we conducted, just over 86 percent of respondents said they had dizziness/lightheadedness/off-balance symptoms due to their anxiety. As you can see, this anxiety symptom is very common.

It’s been long known that anxiety and stress cause an increase in activity in the fear center of the brain (the amygdala and other parts of the brain) and a decrease in activity in the executive function parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex and others).

However, this is the first time brain scans have been used to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children.

The takeaway, however, is not that the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way due to anxiety, but that the brain is responding the way it’s supposed to when we think we are in danger. This change in brain function is an integral part of the body’s survival mechanism.

We explain this change in brain function in more detail in our “Stress Response” article.

We can remedy this change by behaving calmly instead of anxiously. As we use calming behavior, the executive function parts of the brain increase in activity, and the fear center decreases. Thus, restoring our ability to regulate our emotions.

So, it’s not that we can’t regulate our emotions when we’re anxious, but a matter of learning how so that we can gain more control over our emotions when we are anxious.

Recovery Support members can read the articles “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects,” “The Rational Brain And The Emotional Brain,” and the “Natural Ways To Shift The Body Out Of ‘Emergency Mode’” in chapter 14 for more information about how anxiety changes brain function and how to regain emotional control.

You can read the press release about this research below:

Stanford study finds stronger one-way fear signals in brains of anxious kids

Signals from the brain’s fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows.

In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain’s fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, which was published April 21 in Biological Psychiatry, come from the first study to use brain scans to examine how emotion-regulation circuits are changed by anxiety and chronic stress in children. The children studied were 10 or 11 years old, a developmental stage when vulnerability to mood-regulation disorders, such as anxiety and depression, becomes entrenched.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the nature of the signals between two parts of the brain: the amygdalae, almond-shaped nerve clusters on the right and left sides of the brain that function as its fear centers; and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in executive functions such as decision making and emotion regulation.

Advertisement - Article Continues Below

“The more anxious or stress-reactive an individual is, the stronger the bottom-up signal we observed from the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This indicates that the circuit is being hijacked in more anxious children, and it suggests a common marker underlying these two clinical measures, anxiety and stress reactivity.”

Victor Carrion, MD, a co-author of the study and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, said, “This study shows that the communication between our emotional centers and our thinking centers becomes less fluid when there is significant stress. You want that connection to be strongly signaling back and forth. But stress and anxiety of a certain level seem to interrupt that process.”

Carrion is the director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Pediatric Anxiety Program, and is the John A. Turner, MD, Endowed Professor for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Lead authorship of the paper is shared by researcher Stacie Warren, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Yuan Zhang, PhD.

Kids react to images

The study included 45 students in a California community with predominantly low-income residents who often face high levels of adversity. All 45 children had their anxiety levels and stress responses measured using standard behavioral questionnaires. Although their exposure to stress was potentially high, none were diagnosed with mood disorders.

To test how the children’s brains responded as they were trying to regulate negative emotions, the scientists conducted functional MRI scans while the study participants looked at two types of images, neutral and aversive. Neutral images showed pleasant scenes, such as someone taking a walk, whereas aversive images showed potentially distressing scenes, such as a car crash.

The children received instructions about responding to each image. For all the neutral images and half the aversive images, they were asked to look at them and respond to them naturally, rating their emotional state on a numerical scale after seeing each one. They were asked to look at the other half of the aversive images and try to reduce any negative reactions they had by telling themselves a story to make the pictures seem less upsetting — a story such as, “This car crash looks bad, but the people in the vehicles weren’t hurt.” After the kids tried to modify their emotional reaction, they again rated their emotional state on the numerical scale.

As the researchers expected, the children reported less negative emotions after being asked to reappraise their reactions to aversive images.

Using the brain-scan data, the researchers tested the strength and direction of interactions between the amygdala, the fear center, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the reasoning center, while the children viewed the images. Although the children with different levels of anxiety and stress reactivity reported similar reductions in their negative emotions when asked to reappraise the aversive images, their brains were doing different things.

More stress leads to less control of emotional reaction

The more anxious or stressed the child, the stronger the directional signals from the right amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. No such effects were seen in the reverse direction — that is, there was no increase in signaling from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Higher levels of anxiety were associated with less positive initial reactions to aversive images, less ability to regulate emotional reaction in response to aversive images, and more impulsive reactions during reappraisal of aversive images. Higher stress reactivity was linked with less controlled, more impulsive reactions when reappraising aversive images, suggesting that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less able to carry out its job.

Not only do the findings reveal how the brain can be changed by anxiety, they also act as a baseline for future studies to test interventions that may help children manage their anxiety and stress responses, the scientists said.

“We need to be more mindful about intervening,” Menon said. “These results show that the brain is not self-correcting in anxious children.”

“Thinking positively is not something that happens automatically,” Carrion said. “In fact, automatically we think negatively. That, evolutionarily, is what produced results. Negative thoughts are automatic thoughts, and positive thoughts need to be practiced and learned.”

The paper’s other Stanford co-authors are former research assistants Katherine Duberg and Sarah-Nicole Bostan; postdoctoral scholar Percy Mistry, PhD; Weidong Cai, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; former postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, PhD; and former staff researcher Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD.

This work was completed in partnership with the Ravenswood City, Alum Rock and Orchard school districts and Pure Edge Inc., which provides mindfulness curricula for children, and supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, the National Institutes of Health (grants EB022907, NS086085 and MH121069), the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering.

Media Contacts

ERIN DIGITALE
Tel 650-724-9175
digitale@stanford.edu

MARGARITA GALLARDO
Tel 650-723-7897
mjgallardo@stanford.edu

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The combination of good self-help information and working with an experienced anxiety disorder therapist, coach, or counselor is the most effective way to address anxiety and its many symptoms. Until the core causes of anxiety are addressed – which we call the underlying factors of anxiety – a struggle with anxiety unwellness can return again and again. Dealing with the underlying factors of anxiety is the best way to address problematic anxiety.

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Anxiety 101 is a summarized description of anxiety, anxiety disorder, and how to overcome it.

Return to our anxiety disorders and symptoms page.

anxietycentre.com: Information, support, and therapy for anxiety disorder and its symptoms, including the anxiety symptom dizziness, lightheadedness, and feeling off-balance.

References

1. Kelm, Z, et al. “Psychogenic Dizziness: An Important but Overlooked Differential Diagnosis in the Workup of the Dizzy Patient.” NCBI PubMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 May 2018.

2. Popkirov, Stoyan, et al. "Persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD): a common, characteristic and treatable cause of chronic dizziness." Practical Neurology, Jan. 2018.

3. Lahmann, Claas, et al. “Psychiatric Comorbidity and Psychosocial Impairment among Patients with Vertigo and Dizziness.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, 24 June 2014.

4. Meuret, Alicia E., and Thomas Ritz. “Hyperventilation in Panic Disorder and Asthma: Empirical Evidence and Clinical Strategies.” NCBI PubMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Oct. 2010.

5. “Dizziness.” Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 6 Sept. 2018.

6. Takahashi, Sho. “Importance of Cervicogenic General Dizziness.” NCBI PubMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine, May 2018.

7. Brandt, T, and AM Bronstein. “Cervical Vertigo.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, 1 July 2001.

8. Staab, J P, and M J Ruckenstein. “Autonomic Nervous System Function in Chronic Dizziness.” NCBI PubMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Sept. 2007.

9. Ludman, Harold. “Vertigo and Imbalance.” The BMJ, British Medical Journal Publishing Group, 22 Jan. 2014.

10. Bear, Connors, Paradiso (2016). Neuroscience: Exploring the brain - Fourth Edition. Neuroscience: Past, Present, and Future (pp. 13). New York, NY: Wolters Kluwer

11. Mercadente, Anthony, and Tadi, Prasanna. "Neuroanatomy, Gray Matter." StatPearls, Dec 2019.

12. Wurthmann, Sebastian, et al. "Cerebral Gray Matter Changes in Persistent Postural Perceptual Dizziness." Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Dec 2017.

13. ePainAssist, Team. “Sleep Deprivation Dizziness|Causes|Symptoms|Treatment|Prevention|Risks.” EPainAssist, Painassist Inc, 21 Apr. 2018.

14. im, Sung Kyun, et al. “Relationship between Sleep Quality and Dizziness.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, 2018.

15. Riebl, Shaun K, and Brenda M. Davy. “The Hydration Equation: Update on Water Balance and Cognitive Performance.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2013.

16. Hildrum, Bjorn, et al. "Association of low blood pressure with anxiety and depression: the Nord‐Trøndelag Health Study." Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, Jan. 2007.

17. Hildrum, Bjorn, et al. "Anxiety and depression lowers blood pressure: 22-year follow-up of the population based HUNT study, Norway." BMC Public Health, 2011.

18. OE, Eren, et al. "Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation significantly improves quality of life in patients with persistent postural-perceptual dizziness." Journal of Neurology, 21 May 2018.

19. Bonaz, Bruno, et al. "The Vagus Nerve at the Interface of the Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis." Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7 Feb. 2018.

20. Delgado, Jennifer. “Vagus Nerve and Anxiety: Everything You Need to Know.” Psychology Spot, Jennifer Delgado Suárez, 4 Sept. 2018.

21. Breit, Sigrid, et al. "Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders." Frontier in Psychiatry, 13, March 2018.

22. Cha, Yoon-Hee. "Migraine-Associated Vertigo: Diagnosis and Treatment." Seminars in Neurology, 29, Mar. 2010.

23. Baloh, Robert, et al. "Migraine Associated Vertigo." Journal of Clinical Neurology, 20 Sep. 2007.

24. Gill, Lisa. “Drugs That Might Be the Cause of Your Dizziness.” Consumer Reports, 2019.

25. Naoum, S.L., et al. "On the Association between Gastrointestinal Symptoms and Extragastric Manifestations." Gastroenterology Research and Practice, 18 June 2022.

26. Villusyte, Edita, et al. "Associations between peripheral vertigo and gastroesophageal reflux disease." Medical Hypotheses, September 2015.

All of us at anxietycentre.com have experienced debilitating anxiety. But we’ve also overcome it and returned to normal and lasting health. Because we know the hardship anxiety unwellness can cause, we are committed to helping others, with over 34 years of service.
Jim Folk, President, anxietycentre.com

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