Motion Sickness Anxiety Symptom
Motion Sickness, such as nausea, dizziness, lightheadedness, off-balance, and feeling unsteady, is a common anxiety symptom, including anxiety and panic attack symptoms.
It can also be common for all types of anxiety disorder, such as generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder, which is now classified as a stress disorder.
This article explains the relationship between anxiety and a feeling of motion sickness.
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Motion Sickness Common Anxiety Symptom Descriptions
- Nausea: A feeling of sickness with a feeling like you might throw up (vomit).
- Dizziness, lightheadedness: A feeling of being dizzy, lightheaded, off-balance, or unsteady.
- Vertigo: A feeling like you or your surroundings are moving or spinning.
- Cold sweats: Sudden onset of sweating, often accompanied by feeling clammy or chilled.
- Pallor, blanching: Your skin may become pale, sometimes with a greenish tinge.
- Headache: A dull ache, which can be more severe in some cases.
- Fatigue or drowsiness: A general feeling of tiredness or sleepiness.
- Increased salivation: Producing more saliva than usual.
- Difficulty concentrating: Have trouble focusing on tasks or thoughts.
- Visual disturbances: Difficulty focusing the eyes or mild blurring of vision.
- Rapid breathing: Breathing may become faster and shallower.
- Stomach discomfort: General uneasiness in the stomach, sometimes described as "butterflies."
- Loss of appetite: Don’t feel hungry or find food unappealing.
- Vomiting: In severe cases.
Motion sickness symptoms 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" for no reason.
- Range in intensity from mild, to moderate, to severe.
- Come in waves where it’s strong one moment and eases off the next.
- Occur for a while, subside, and 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.
This symptom can seem more noticeable when undistracted, resting, trying to sleep, or waking up.
All the above combinations and variations are common.
To see if anxiety might be playing a role in your 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 anxiety could be contributing to or causing your anxiety symptoms, including feeling like impending doom symptoms.
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Causes
Medical Advisory
Talk to your doctor about all new, changing, persistent, and returning symptoms as some medical conditions and medications can cause anxiety-like symptoms.
1. The Stress Response
Anxious behavior, such as worry, activates the stress response, which prepares the body for immediate emergency action – to fight or flee. This survival reaction is more commonly known as the “fight or flight response.”[1][2]
The stress response causes many body-wide changes, such as:
- Quickly converts the body’s energy reserves into “fuel” (blood sugar) to provide an instant boost of energy.
- Increases heart rate, respiration, and metabolism due to the boost in energy.
- Stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing nervous system activity to be more sensitive and reactive to danger.
- Heightens most of the body’s senses to be more aware of danger.
- Shunts blood to parts of the body more vital to survival, such as the brain, arms, legs, and vital organs, and away from parts less vital for survival, such as the stomach, digestive system, and skin. It accomplishes this by constricting blood vessels in certain parts of the body and dilating them in others.
- Suppresses digestion so that most of the body’s resources are available for emergency action.
- Increases respiration to accommodate the increase in heart rate.
For complete information about the many body-wide changes, visit “The Stress Response” article.
The degree of stress response is proportional to the degree of anxious behavior. For instance, the more anxious you are, the more dramatic the stress response changes.
Since stress responses push the body beyond its internal balance (homeostasis), stress responses acutely stress the body. As such, anxiety stresses the body.
Therefore, anxiety symptoms are symptoms of stress. They are called anxiety symptoms because anxious behavior is the main source of the stress that stresses the body, causing symptoms.
Many of these changes can cause a feeling of motion sickness. More specifically:
- Vestibular System Disruption: Stress hormones can affect the vestibular system, which is responsible for balance and spatial orientation. A stress hormone affected vestibular system can cause dizziness and a feeling of motion even when stationary.
- Hypersensitivity to Body Sensations: Stress hormones increase nervous system activity, making us more aware of bodily sensations and movement. This heightened awareness can make normal, subtle movements feel exaggerated, leading to a sense of motion or imbalance.
- Neurotransmitter Imbalance: Stress hormones can affect neurotransmitter balances, especially in the stomach, which can contribute to nausea and other motion sickness-like symptoms.
- Heightened Sensory Perception: Stress hormones increase sensory perception, which can lead to a mismatch between visual input and the body's sense of movement, similar to what occurs in true motion sickness.
- Suppressed digestive action: A stress hormone-caused change in digestive function can lead to symptoms like motion sickness. It can also affect the vestibular system, exacerbating a feeling of motion sickness.
- Circular action: Dizziness and lightheadedness can cause stomach distress, exacerbating dizziness and lightheadedness, causing one to fuel the other.
Any of the above anxiety-activated stress response changes can lead to a feeling of motion sickness.
2. Stress-Response Hyperstimulation
When stress responses occur infrequently, the body can quickly recover from the many stress response changes.
However, when stress responses occur too frequently, such as from overly anxious behavior, the body can remain in a state of semi-stress response readiness, which we call “stress-response hyperstimulation” since stress hormones are powerful stimulants.
Hyperstimulation is also often referred to as “hyperarousal,” “HPA axis dysfunction,” or “nervous system dysregulation.”[3][4]
Visit our “Hyperstimulation And Its Effects” article for more information about how hyperstimulation can affect the body and how we feel.
Just as an active stress response acutely affects the body, causing acute anxiety symptoms, hyperstimulation chronically affects the body, causing chronic anxiety symptoms.
A persistent motion sickness feeling can be caused by anxiety-caused hyperstimulation.
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Other Factors
Other factors can create stress and cause anxiety-like symptoms, as well as aggravate existing anxiety symptoms, including:
- Medication
- Recreational drugs
- Stimulants
- Sleep deprivation
- Fatigue
- Hyper and hypoventilation
- Low blood sugar
- Nutritional deficiencies
- Dehydration
- Hormone changes
- Pain
Select the relevant link for more information.
Treatment
When other factors cause or aggravate this anxiety symptom, addressing the specific cause can reduce and eliminate this symptom.
When an active stress response causes this symptom, ending the active stress response will cause this acute anxiety symptom to subside.
Keep in mind that it can take up to 20 minutes or more for the body to recover from a major stress response. But this is normal and needn’t be a cause for concern.
When hyperstimulation (chronic stress) causes a feeling of motion sickness, eliminating hyperstimulation will end this anxiety symptom.
You can eliminate hyperstimulation by:
- Reducing stress.
- Containing anxious behavior (since anxiety creates stress).
- Regular deep relaxation.
- Avoiding stimulants.
- Regular light to moderate exercise.
- 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.
Recovery Support members can view chapters 5, 6, 7, 14 and more for more detailed information about recovering from hyperstimulation and anxiety disorder.
As the body recovers from hyperstimulation, it stops sending symptoms, including this one.
Symptoms of chronic stress 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 a feeling of motion sickness 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. 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.
Keep in mind that it can take a long time for the body 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.
- Reducing stress.
- Increasing rest.
- Faithfully practicing your recovery strategies.
- Passively accepting your symptoms.
- Containing anxious behavior.
- Being patient.
These will bring results in time.
When you do the right work, the body has to recover!
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Short-term strategies
Even though eliminating hyperstimulation will eliminate chronic anxiety symptoms, including anxiety-caused motion sickness feeling, some people have found the following strategies helpful.
However, keep in mind that each person can have a unique symptom experience since each person is somewhat physically, chemically, psychologically, and emotionally unique. What might work for one person might not for another.
- Reduce stress – Since all anxiety symptoms are stress-related, reducing stress can alleviate this symptom. There are many ways to reduce stress. You can read about many natural stress reduction strategies in Chapter 14 in the Recovery Support area.
- Regular good sleep – Getting good sleep each night (6.5 to 8 hours per night) can significantly reduce stress, which can improve all anxiety symptoms, including a motion sickness feeling.
- Regular deep relaxation – Regular deep relaxation is a great way to reduce stress and overall stimulation. As stress and stimulation diminish, so will anxiety symptoms, including this one.
- Regular light to moderate exercise – Regular exercise reduces stress and improves stress symptoms. However, we don’t recommend strenuous exercise since it stresses the body.
- Maintain a Stable Visual Reference – When feeling dizzy or off-balance, focus on a stable point in your environment to help your brain recalibrate.
- Keep well hydrated – Dehydration is a common cause of stress-like symptoms, including a motion sickness feeling. Keeping your body well hydrated can prevent and reduce anxiety-like and anxiety symptoms. Some doctors recommend drinking 2 liters of water per day.
- Avoid stimulants – Stimulants bring about their stimulating effect by causing the secretion of stress hormones. To reduce stress and symptoms, we need to decrease stimulation, not increase it.
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.
Therapy
Unidentified and unaddressed underlying factors cause issues with anxiety. As such, they are the primary reason why anxiety symptoms persist.[5][6][7]
Addressing your underlying factors (Level Two recovery) is most important if you want lasting success.
Addressing Level Two recovery can help you:
- Contain anxious behavior.
- Become unafraid of anxiety symptoms and the strong feelings of anxiety.
- End anxiety symptoms.
- Successfully address the underlying factors that so often cause issues with anxiety.
- End what can feel like out-of-control worry.
All our recommended anxiety therapists have had anxiety disorder and overcame it. Their personal experience with anxiety disorder and their Master's Degree and above professional training gives them insight other therapists don't have.
If you want to achieve lasting success over anxiety disorder, any one of our recommended therapists would be a good choice.
Working with an experienced anxiety disorder therapist is the most effective way to treat anxiety disorder, especially if you have persistent symptoms and difficulty containing anxious behavior, such as worry.
In many cases, working with an experienced therapist is the only way to overcome stubborn anxiety.
Prevalence
In online polls we conducted, the vast majority of anxious people (approximately 86 percent) experienced a motion sickness feeling due to their anxiety.
For more information, visit the “Dizziness” anxiety symptom.
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Common Anxiety Symptoms
Additional Resources
- For a comprehensive list of Anxiety Disorders Symptoms Signs, Types, Causes, Diagnosis, and Treatment.
- Anxiety and panic attacks symptoms can be powerful experiences. Find out what they are and how to stop them.
- How to stop an anxiety attack and panic.
- Free online anxiety tests to screen for anxiety. Two minute tests with instant results. Such as:
- Anxiety 101 is a summarized description of anxiety, anxiety disorder, and how to overcome it.
Return to our anxiety disorders signs and symptoms page.
anxietycentre.com: Information, support, and therapy for anxiety disorder and its symptoms, including Motion Sickness anxiety symptoms.
References
1. Yaribeygi, Habib, et al. “The Impact of Stress on Body Function: A Review.” EXCLI Journal, Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, 2017.
2. Godoy, Livea, et al. "A Comprehensive Overview on Stress Neurobiology: Basic Concepts and Clinical Implications." Frontiers In Behavioral Neuroscience, 3, July 2018.
3. Elbers, Jorina, et al. "Wired for Threat: Clinical Features of Nervous System Dysregulation in 80 Children." Pediatric Neurology, Dec 2018.
4. Teixeira, Renata Roland, et al. “Chronic Stress Induces a Hyporeactivity of the Autonomic Nervous System in Response to Acute Mental Stressor and Impairs Cognitive Performance in Business Executives.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2015.
6. Hofmann, Stefan G., et al. “The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-Analyses.” Cognitive Therapy and Research, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Oct. 2012.
6. Leichsenring, Falk. “Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy the Gold Standard for Psychotherapy?” JAMA, American Medical Association, 10 Oct. 2017.
7. DISCLAIMER: Because each body is somewhat chemically unique, and because each person will have a unique mix of symptoms and underlying factors, recovery results may vary. Variances can occur for many reasons, including due to the severity of the condition, the ability of the person to apply the recovery concepts, and the commitment to making behavioral change.