How Anxiety Causes Disorientation

Disorientation is when you cannot seem to focus on the time, place or activities that are happening at the current moment. A person is said to be disoriented when they seem at a loss for what's going on, often with considerable confusion.

There is often a subjective feeling of disorientation when a person has anxiety, especially during an anxiety attack. It's common for those with intense stress and anxiety to suddenly feel completely disoriented as that anxiety takes over.

Disorientation During and After Severe Anxiety

If you feel disoriented for an extended period of time or have suffered profound memory loss, it is important to visit a doctor. Anxiety disorientation tends not to last a significant period of time, and often comes and goes during times of intense anxiety.

Most disorientation occurs during or after an anxiety attack. It's rare for someone with anxiety to feel disoriented at random, especially without additional anxiety symptoms.

Types of Anxiety Disorientation

Anxiety disorientation tends to be more subjective. It most often occurs when it's simply too hard to follow your thoughts or pay attention to your surroundings because you're stuck "inside of your own head." There are two general causes of this feeling of being disoriented, although these are certainly not the only possible reasons this feeling may occur:

Rapid Thoughts

One of the more common reasons for feeling disoriented is that you're suffering from so many overwhelming and rapid thoughts that you struggle to think about where you are, what you're doing, or your surroundings.

Racing thoughts are a common symptom of anxiety attacks, as are thoughts that are so focused on how you feel and your symptoms that you struggle to focus on anything else. The thoughts and the feeling of doom that come from anxiety are so overwhelming, that the person subjectively struggles with the moment, and may forget what's happening or be less responsive to their surroundings.

This is a type of disorientation that is slightly different than what one would expect from diseases that affect the mind. It's not necessarily confusion, so much an inability to focus because of the wave of physical and emotional symptoms.

Hyperventilation

Hyperventilating can also cause you to feel disoriented. Hyperventilation is a common problem with people that have anxiety attacks. Hyperventilation can occur for many reasons - not just breathing quickly, although that is common with anxiety as well - and when it does, it reduces blood flow to your brain.

This can cause you to feel "spacey" and lightheaded, almost as though you might faint. In rare cases, some people do faint. When hyperventilation is at its worst, it can cause you to feel incredibly disoriented because your brain doesn't have enough energy to concentrate.

In some cases this may also be combined with the racing thoughts to make disorientation even worse.