If you’re going nuts because of muscle twitching all throughout your entire body, stop fearing the worst, and don’t even worry about something even a little bit serious.
Muscle twitching isn’t necessarily a sign of something dreadful just because it’s happening all over your body.
The most common cause of body-wide twitching muscles is anxiety.
Lack of adequate fluid intake, plus exercise or heavy physical activity, are two other common causes of muscle twitching, which may begin as localized.
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But it has a funny way of “spreading” throughout your body moments after you begin worrying about it.
Yes, muscle twitching all over the body often starts in one spot, such as the thigh, arm or calf.
This is something that may have happened hundreds of times to a person, without him or her giving it even one second of thought.
But for some reason, one day, the twitching in this localized spot becomes the focus of attention.
Since it’s so easy to research things on the Internet, this person then decides to do a Web search on twitching muscles, and all sorts of interesting medical information shows up.
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As a result, the person starts thinking he or she might have a deadly neurological disease, in which muscle twitching is a symptom.
But this kind of thinking is akin to believing you might have laryngeal cancer — just because you have a scratchy throat.
Upon filling up with anxiety over the consideration of this neurological disease, the individual then starts feeling more areas of his body begin to twitch.
The muscle twitching spreads throughout the whole body, and pretty quickly, too.
However, this is NOT how a neurological disease operates.
But it IS how anxiety can cause all sorts of nerve-impulse firing in muscles.
“Some people have benign fasciculation syndrome, which is just that – benign,” says Daniel Kantor, MD, director of the Neurology Residency Program, Florida Atlantic University.
He continues: “This means that even without an underlying muscle or nervous system disease, people sometimes have fasciculations.”
Fasciculations is the medical term for twitching muscles.
“While muscle twitching can be a concerning and disturbing symptom, many people have it simply as ‘one of those things,’ and in that case, it is nothing to worry about.
“Of course, you always want to clarify this with your primary care doctor or neurologist to exclude other, more serious, causes.”
When muscle twitching is the symptom of a serious neurological disorder, it’s almost always accompanied by other symptoms such as strange cramping or an uncharacteristic weakness such as one day finding you can’t hold your hairdryer.
Anxiety can produce dozens of physical symptoms, and muscle twitching all over the body is one of them.
Dr. Kantor is also President Emeritus, Florida Society of Neurology.
Lorra Garrick has been covering medical, health and cybersecurity topics for many years, having written thousands of feature articles for a variety of print magazines and websites. She is also a former ACE-certified personal trainer.
Top image: Shutterstock/Song_about_summer
Source: neurologique.org/
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