26 Times People Were Told They Were Just Anxious Reveal What Was The Actual Issue

Coeliac disease. A decade of trying all kinds of meds and having counsellors telling me I must be anxious *about* something, panic attacks don’t just come out of nowhere.

Turns out untreated autoimmune disorders wreck your nervous system 👍.

ADHD

meds took ALL the random anxiety away.

Complex trauma due to neglect beginning in infancy and throughout my childhood. I also learned how common it is for neglected children to not recognise that the way they were treated was negligent. .

Cancer.

Neuroendocrine Tumor, specifically.

Luckily slow growing and removed with one surgery.

Took ten years to get a proper diagnosis. Shocking the Lexapro didn't fix it.

Anemia due to internally hemorrhaging stomach ulcers and Endometriosis. I kept telling my Dr that I had an impending sense of doom I was going to die but he just sent me to a therapist instead. One day I fainted on the street and nearly bled out and needed 2 blood transfusions to stabilize. The ulcers were caused by taking NSAIDs for my Endo pain. It's actually really common for women to have hidden iron deficiency (you can have normal HGB but low ferritin) and a lot of the symptoms mimic anxiety (panic attacks, heart palpations, shortness of breath, insomnia, stomach pain, headaches, vertigo & dizziness, blurred vision, random muscle spasms etc.).

Multiple sclerosis , my doctor made me feel like i was losing my mind before i got diagnosed at ER.

My wife was misdiagnosed with Panic Disorder for a long time. Turns out it was Epilepsy and she was having seizures, not panic attacks.

I knew a guy who kept saying that he was having heart attacks. The doctors kept saying anxiety.

He found out years later, he had had about 10 small heart attacks.

Debilitating OCD.

HAHA I am female and have multiple autoimmune conditions so you're describing the last 2 decades of my life with 50% of my new doctors. 20 years ago "anxiety" turned out to be what I told them I had - but it took 6 specialists and a smart one to finally agree.

Funny how my dad and grandma have the same condition (psoriatic arthritis) and I had most of the textbook symptoms, but hey, here's a Lexapro.

Thyroid disease.

A magnesium deficiency and an iron deficiency, causing weird extra heartbeats.  .

Perimenopause. My first symptoms were heart palpitations. I thought I was having heart attacks. My doctor brushed it off as anxiety.

Chronic migraine with aura, pelvic floor dysfunction, chronic intermittant acid reflux, and sleep apnea.

I kept being told that my aura symptoms were something that I was imagining due to anxiety for years until I finally saw a neurologist. It turned out that I wasn't imagining the vertigo, visual changes, sensory sensitivities, motor difficulties, tinnitus, or numbness, tingling, and weakness. This is all my migraine aura.

'Anxiety' is a common assumption for any symptom for women.

Anxiety turned out to be a pulmonary embolism in my lower left lung.

A heart condition called premature ventricular contractions that causes a fluttering feeling in the heart.

The tricky thing was that the heart condition triggered medical anxiety for me, so I *was* experiencing anxiety...but there was a root cause.

Optic neuritis. Doctor told me to go have a beer. In his defense I wasn't presenting with pain, just blindness(which should have sent me immediately to the hospital but wherever) I kinda enjoyed the beer, as much as you can when you are terrified you can't see anymore lol.

Hyperthyroidism.

First time- some flavor of tachycardia. Something’s wrong, they’re not sure exactly what, but they’ve confirmed it’s not only anxiety.
Second time- kidney stone.

Chronic vestibular migraine.