If you wonder, “Can anxiety cause muscle pain?” then you must be someone who has felt muscle aches after a long day of stress and worry. Anxiety doesn’t just mess with your thoughts and brain functioning; it can take a toll on your body too. Those unexplained aches may be your body’s way of responding to the stress and tension caused by anxiety.
Anxiety and muscle soreness are often connected. Whenever you feel anxious, your brain alerts your body and in response, your body tightens up, preparing your body for any incoming danger or threat, even if there is none in reality. This random tightness in your shoulders, neck, and back is often the work of anxiety.
In this blog post, we will further explore the connection between anxiety and muscle pain. We will understand how anxiety aches develop and what are the possible treatments or relaxation techniques to relieve these pains. We will try to answer the main question, “Can anxiety cause muscle pain?” in more depth. By understanding the connection between anxiety and muscle soreness, you can calm your mind and body together.
What is Anxiety Muscle Pain?
Anxiety muscle pain is actually the pain and discomfort in our muscles after chronic episodes of anxiety. Muscle pain often appears as tightness, stiffness, and sharp pains in our neck, jaws, shoulders, back, and other parts of the body.
Diagnosis According to DSM-5:
The DSM-5 actually does not mention anxiety muscle pain as a separate diagnosis, but it does mention muscle tension as one of the symptoms of anxiety disorders, such as Generalised Anxiety Disorder(GAD) which can contribute to muscle pain.
Symptoms of Muscle Pain
The following are some of the common symptoms of muscle pain:
- Stiffness
Your muscles can feel tight or less movable when you try to lift your arm or leg which makes it harder for you to move freely and perform your daily tasks.
- Soreness
Your muscles may feel sore and painful when you touch them. This usually occurs after a physical activity, exercise or a stress episode but sometimes your muscles feel sore when you haven’t actually done anything physically demanding.
- Tension
While suffering from muscle pain, you might experience tension in your jaws and shoulders. You can experience headaches accompanied with a constant dull ache in certain parts of your body.
- Weakness
Sometimes your muscles may feel weaker because they are sore and lack strength overall. In such situations even the simplest tasks like lifting your arm, going for a walk and maintaining your normal posture can become a challenge. The weakness can also make your movements shaky or unsteady and you might feel a loss of control on your muscles.
- Muscle Spasms
When your muscles are weak, stiff and sore you might experience a sudden twitch or spasm which usually feels like small and sudden movements that we usually can’t control.
Can Anxiety cause Muscle Pain?
Anxiety and muscle pain are closely connected. When you feel anxious, your body reacts by going into a heightened state of alert. While this response is helpful in short bursts to deal with immediate stress, when anxiety becomes chronic, your body stays in this heightened state for extended periods. Over time, muscles that are constantly tense can become sore, fatigued, and uncomfortable.
This anxiety-related muscle pain can last for a few hours or even days, depending on how your body handles stress and the severity of the anxiety episode.
This actually answers our question, which is “Can anxiety cause muscle pain?” Now we definitely know that the answer is ‘Yes’, but there’s more to it than that.
Research over the years has supported the connection between anxiety and muscle pain. For instance, a study nearly 40 years ago established that anxiety and muscle pain are directly related, though the extent of this relationship varies between individuals. In 2009, another study confirmed that muscle pain is a symptom of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), further linking anxiety to physical discomfort.
Also in 2023, studies showed that people with GAD experience more muscle tension in response to stress compared to those without the disorder. In the same year, another study explored the link between anxiety and muscle pain in children. They found headaches to be more common in little girls than boys. Overall, musculoskeletal pain was found in both genders influenced by anxiety.
With the help of these research studies, the question “Can anxiety cause muscle pain?” is answered with a definite yes. But it’s important to understand exactly how anxiety causes muscle pain. Let’s talk about the factors that contribute to this connection one by one.
How Anxiety Causes Muscle Pain
Here are the key factors that explain how anxiety can lead to muscle pain:
1. Chronic Muscle Tension
In response to anxiety, people may unconsciously tense up their body muscles. This reaction is a natural instinct that happens as a way to prepare the body for danger. While this may be beneficial to the body at first but when this tension is held for extended periods of time, it can later result in stiffness, soreness, pain, and tenderness in the muscles of the shoulders, neck and back. Eventually, these parts of the body get exhausted, leading to increased discomfort.
2. Changes in Breathing Patterns
Anxiety can cause hyperventilation, which is characterized by shallow and rapid breathing. It decreases the concentration of carbon dioxide in one’s blood which could lead to muscle contractions or spasms, mostly in legs, arms, and the chest area. Further, it allows for the constant feeling of tightness and soreness in several muscles due to unsatisfactory oxygen exchange in the tissues oxygenated bloodstream.
3. Fight-or-Flight Response Gets Activated
The fight-or-flight response is the body’s automatic reaction to stress or perceived threats. It prepares you to either face or escape the danger by releasing stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. While this is a survival mechanism, prolonged activation keeps your muscles in a state of readiness, leading to muscle fatigue and soreness.
4. Restricted Blood Flow
When you’re anxious, blood flow is redirected from non-essential functions, such as muscle recovery, to essential organs needed for immediate survival. This restricted blood flow slows down the repair of muscle tissues, increasing the likelihood of muscle pain and stiffness after periods of tension.
5. Stress Hormone Alteration
Worrying influences the excess creation of cortisol thus preventing the muscle from functioning properly. The net effect is that the more you stress, the more tension and soreness takes over your muscles. After a chronic period, the imbalance results in the pain receptors being heightened, and the muscle tissues become weak and break easily.
6. Pain Intolerance
Pain and anxiety go hand in hand; when one increases, the other also increases with it. Recently, a 2019 study found that anxiety not only causes muscle pain but can actually make it worse by lowering your pain tolerance. This means you may feel more sensitive to pain, even in areas that wouldn’t normally hurt. This is due to anxiety amplifying the signals sent from your muscles to your brain. Over time, this increased sensitivity creates a vicious cycle where pain and anxiety feed off each other.
7. Poor Sleep Quality
Anxiety can disrupt one’s sleep, leading to insomnia or restless nights. During sleep, your body repairs and relaxes muscles. A lack of quality sleep hinders this recovery process, leaving muscles tense and more susceptible to pain. Sleep deprivation also lowers your pain tolerance, making any muscle discomfort feel more intense.
8. Involuntary Muscle Clenching
Anxious individuals might clench their jaw, fists or involuntarily perform some muscle contraction during the high-stress moments as a reflex. In turn, such a repetitive muscle contraction or clenching could result in muscle fatigue or pain over time, more specifically in the jaw muscles leading to what is referred to as temporomandibular joint pain.
9. Change in Posture
Anxiety prompts a lot of people to adopt lower postures, making them hunch their shoulders or stiffen their neck and back. This negatively affects the muscles in the upper body and then causes pain and discomfort.
10. Nutritional Deficiencies
As part of chronic anxiety, at times appetite gets affected, resulting in poor nutrition. Muscles require a number of minerals like magnesium, calcium and potassium, which in case of deficiencies can cause muscle cramps, spasms and orthoalgia.
11. Psychosomatic Effects
Muscle soreness can also be caused by imagination. It hurts because of mental stress and not due to overstraining. Pain and anxiety can sometimes be felt in muscles without any actual cause. Such feelings are very elusive.
Understanding this link between anxiety and muscle pain is the first step to managing both effectively. But how do you know if your muscle pain is anxiety-induced? Let’s talk about it.
How to Identify Anxiety Induced Muscle Pain?
If you are confused about the reason for your muscle pain and want to know whether your pain is because of anxiety or not than you should try to notice these signs in your body:
- Pain Without Physical Activity
If you are experiencing muscle pain and tiredness when you haven’t really done any physical activity or exercise, then you might be experiencing anxiety aches because anxiety can make you feel tired and suffer muscle pain without any excess physical activity.
- Muscle Tension
If you are frequently experiencing tightening, and stiffness in your neck, jaws, and shoulders without any undue physical pressure, then there’s a high probability that it can be anxiety muscle pain.
- Pain During Stressful Situations
Sometimes you might notice a significant increase in your muscle pain than usual during stressful situations. This can be a very clear answer to our question “ Can anxiety cause muscle pain”. Well, it clearly can. Your body is answering the question by itself.
Many people experience severe headaches and migraines due to stress and overthinking. They usually feel like a dull, constant ache around their scalp or forehead area. These headaches can last for hours or days depending upon your mental state and anxiety quotient.
- Relief After Relaxation
If your muscle pain comes and goes and gets better after you engage in certain relaxation activities like sleeping, meditation, yoga, taking a hot bath or a therapy session, then in that case, it is truly a sign of anxiety aches.
- Overall Body Aches
In some cases, your full body muscles feel heavy and painful even when you haven’t really exerted yourself. These aches can be a very prominent sign of anxiety aches.
- Burning Sensation
Sometimes you might experience a burning or tingling sensation in your muscles due to prolonged stress and anxiety affecting the nerves.
- Pain in Specific Area
Anxiety induced muscle pain sometimes holds a specific area. It can be your chest, shoulders, facial muscles, arms or back. This often happens when you are unknowingly holding stress in those areas.
- Pain Due To Trouble In Breathing
Anxiety often causes breathing problems which include rapid or shallow breathing. This difficulty in breathing can cause tightening of the muscles in the chest and abdomen area.
- Sensitive Muscles
Prolonged anxiety episodes can often make your muscles very sore and tender. They may feel weak and painful when you try to move or touch them. Whenever your muscles sensitivity is increased then normal, you should definitely consider controlling your anxiety and focus on your mental health.
Other Causes of Muscle Pain
We know that you are actually here to find out the answer to our question” Can anxiety cause muscle pain” but muscle pain can be actually caused by various reasons. According to a study from 2015, muscle pain is actually caused by nerve signals from muscles and is often triggered by reduced blood flow, inflammation and mechanical forces. There can be many reasons for reduced blood flow and inflammation. Let’s first discuss some of the very common reasons among them.
- Excess Physical Activity
Sometimes exercising too much or doing excess physical activities that your muscles aren’t used to causes muscle soreness and pain. This condition is called delayed onset muscle (DOMS).
- Dehydration:
Cramps are sharp and sudden involuntary contractions that occur in your muscles which causes pain and discomfort.One of the common generic reasons of muscle cramps is dehydration as it affects the balance of electrolytes like sodium and potassium in the body which are very important for normal muscle contractions.
- Poor Posture:
In most cases, people can easily develop muscle pain due to sitting, standing or sleeping in the wrong posture for prolonged periods of time. It can lead to muscle pain in the back, neck and shoulders specifically as well as other body parts.
- Infections:
If you have an infection like flu, malaria, fever due to some viral illness, it does cause muscle pain as your body’s response to that infection.
- Medications:
If you are taking some medications for a specific problem in your body then in some cases muscle pain can be a result of the side effects of those medicines.
- Nutritional Deficiencies:
Lack of enough essential nutrients like potassium and calcium in your body can cause muscle cramps and aches which need to be treated immediately by fulfilling your deficiencies.
- Other Medical Conditions:
Chronic medical conditions such as arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia or chronic muscle fatigue can cause severe muscle pain over prolonged periods of time.
- Medical Injury:
If you have suffered an injury like sprain, strains, falls or accidents then your muscle pain can be a result of any of these injuries that you might have experienced.
- Sleep disorders:
Poor sleep routine or chronic sleeping disorders such as insomnia can increase muscle stiffness and soreness because your muscles are not getting the rest that is required for their healing and relaxation.
Prevention of Muscle Pain Due To Anxiety
If you want to prevent yourself from the painful muscle aches that you can suffer due to your anxiety episodes then you should seriously follow the following prevention methods:
- Regularly involve yourself in relaxation techniques like yoga, meditation, deep breathing exercises to help your mind and muscles to stay very calm and relaxed.
- Prioritize yourself and take 10 minutes each day from your daily routine to practice stretching exercises and specifically in those areas where there is an increased tendency of holding tension like your neck and shoulders.
- Go to a gym or engage in regular light physical activities such as going for a nice walk, swimming or maybe just a light cardio at your home. These physical activities will release your built up tension and strengthen your muscles.
- If you are preparing for a very difficult exam or a presentation for work and it’s stressful and prolonged then you must take short breaks to sit or stand to relax your muscles and stretch them a bit to avoid muscle strain.
- Make sure to prioritize your sleep by getting 6-8 hours of rest each night to give your brain proper rest and prevent muscle tension buildup.
- Drink a minimum of 8 glasses of water each day. You can fill up a 1-liter bottle everyday and carry it with you to your workplace or school to stay hydrated for your day and avoid muscle cramps.
- If you had a stressful day at work, school or home, you must take a hot shower to relax your tensed muscles. A heating pad should do the job as well if you can’t take a hot bath at that moment.
- Eat a healthy diet that consists of vitamins, minerals, protein and necessary fibre as these foods will increase your muscle strength. Limit your caffeine and sugar intake as both of these items are dangerous when taken in surplus.
- Focus on your mental health in general and learn to fight your anxiety and avoid its long term effects on your physical health.
Treatment of Muscle Pain Due to Anxiety
The following treatments are proven to be effective for muscle pain due to anxiety:
- Physiotherapy
If your muscle pain is unbearable then you should definitely visit a good physiotherapist in your city. Physical therapy involves exercises and techniques that will ease your stress and relieve your muscle pain.
- Pain Relief Ointments
If your muscle ache is mild, you can apply pain-relieving ointments in the localised areas that will provide temporary relief from your pain by numbing and reducing inflammation in those specific body parts.
- Chiropractic Alignment
Seeing a good chiropractor can be a great help because chiropractic adjustments can really help to align your body muscles and relieve your pain within minutes.
- Medications
If you are tired and want a quick relief of pain without doing any exercise then you should take medicines like ibuprofen, aspirin or acetaminophen as they can be quick muscle pain relievers and will reduce your inflammation.
You should definitely try essential oil blends used for anxiety and panic attacks relief and prevention, such as lavender, peppermint and eucalyptus, to provide a soothing relief to your sore muscles. There are two basic ways to use these essential oil blends which are: diffusion and gently massaging them on your sore muscles.
Massaging your affected areas can help to increase blood circulation in that area, reduce muscle tension, and in turn reduce the pain. A professional massage will be a much better option but home massage will do the job as well.
- Heat and Cold Therapy
You can apply a heating pad or a warm towel to your sore and tender muscles to ease your pain. Take a hot shower to ease your muscles if you can. If you have inflammation, then cold ice packs can help to numb your pain and reduce swelling.
- Progressive Muscle Relaxation
In this method, you contract and then gradually release each muscle group. You can also use a foam roller to gently massage tight and sore muscles to release any knots in the muscles. This process can be a great help to ease your muscle pain due to stress.
- Acupuncture
This is a traditional Chinese medicine practice that involves inserting very thin needles into specific points in the body to stimulate the flow of energy. It stimulates our nerves, muscles, and connective tissues. This increases our blood flow, which triggers the release of our body’s natural painkillers, called endorphins, which help in reducing pain and inflammation. It’s commonly used to treat muscle pain and stress related conditions.
Must-Read Self-Help Books
The following are some books which will prove to be very helpful for you in understanding anxiety and muscle pain.
The Pain Relief Secret by Sara Warren:
In this book, Sara Warren talks about how anxiety and muscle pain are connected through chronic muscle tension. She explains that whenever we are anxious, our muscles tend to stay contracted for a long time, which can cause tightness and pain in our neck, shoulders, and back. She has further emphasized using clinical somatics, a series of exercises that retrains the nervous system and helps to release chronic tension in the body.
Healing Back Pain by John E. Sarno:
In this book, Dr.John E.Sarno states that anxiety is a major contributor to back muscle pain. He has introduced the concept of Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS), where repressed emotions, including anxiety can lead to chronic muscle back pain. Sarno emphasizes the fact that we can only deal with these psychological factors by establishing a strong mind-body connection and understanding the emotional roots of pain.
The Anxiety Book by Jonathan Davidson:
In this book, Sir Jonathan has directly linked anxiety to physical symptoms like muscle tension and pain. Davidson explains that this muscle pain is actually the body’s natural stress response. The author further explains that managing this pain requires addressing the underlying anxiety through various techniques and even medications if necessary.
Therapy-Providing Organisations
Here are some of the online platforms that provide therapy and support and can help you in understanding our question “ Can anxiety cause muscle pain” in more depth.
Anxiety Depression Association of America (ADAA): This is a leading mental health institute of America which deals with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and co- occurring conditions.
Bring Change to Mind: This is a modern therapy-providing organisation which focuses more on breaking the stigma around mental health illness and making a difference in the lives of teens and adults going through mental health issues.
Asian Mental Health Project: The Asian Mental Health Project promotes mental health awareness and support within the Asian community through resources, education, and advocacy.
MentalHealth.gov: SAMHSA is an organisation focused on improving mental health services and promoting recovery from mental illnesses and substance use disorders in the United States.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the question “Can anxiety cause muscle pain” is definitely answered as Yes. Understanding this link between anxiety and muscle pain is the key to treating both anxiety and muscle pain. We have briefly discussed the causes, prevention, and then treatment of muscle pain due to anxiety.
We are sure that you must have benefitted from this blog if you’ve read it thoroughly and tried to understand the depth of anxiety and its effect on our physical health. In short, focusing on your mental health and addressing your anxiety will not only improve your mental health but it will prove to be a significant help in improving your physical health as well.
Frequently Asked Question
The following are some frequently asked questions about anxiety and muscle pain other than the main question, “Can anxiety cause muscle pain?”.
- Does stress cause muscle aches?
Yes, as we have already discussed in detail above, stress does cause muscle aches. Whenever we are stressed, our muscles get tensed up and sometimes we don’t even realise it. Prolonged stress keeps the muscles tensed for longer periods of time which results in muscle pain.
In 2017, a study found that there is a strong relationship between masticatory muscle pain and mental states like stress and anxiety.
- Can anxiety cause muscle twitching?
Yes, anxiety can cause muscle twitching.It happens when our nervous system is overstimulated due to anxiety. In such situations, anxiety can cause involuntary muscle movements known as muscle twitching.
- What are anxiety aches and pains?
Anxiety aches and pains fall under the category of physical symptoms of anxiety that affect the muscles and joints. The commonly affected areas include the shoulders, neck, back, jaws and legs.
- How are anxiety and muscle soreness connected?
Anxiety and muscle soreness are actually directly connected. Whenever we are anxious, anxiety triggers a fight or flight response which leads to muscle tension and results in soreness over time.
A study from 2010 indicates that anxiety and muscle tension and soreness are very closely connected but this relationship may be stronger or weaker as it depends upon the individuals.
- Can muscle pain cause anxiety?
Yes, in many cases anxiety can be a result of muscle pain as well. Whenever we are suffering from chronic muscle pain, it makes us very uncomfortable and tense. In such cases, negative and anxious thoughts may build up, which affects our mood and overall well being. This usually ends up in a vicious cycle where muscle pain causes anxiety and in turn the anxiety worsens the muscle pain severely.
This year, a research study was published which focused on how muscle pain actually causes anxiety and ways to manage both together.
- How do you manage muscle pain with anxiety?
Managing muscle pain with anxiety can be challenging but by practicing all the relaxation techniques, treatments and medications that we have already mentioned above, you can easily reduce both muscle pain and anxiety. By being dedicated and giving yourself enough time, you can improve your mental and physical health which will allow you to regain a sense of ease and control on your body.