Are there circumstances where a person can have high anxiety subconsciously to where is effects them but they don’t feel it consciously?
Being affected by anxiety but not being aware of it? You just described my childhood. High levels of anxiety, including the physical symptoms, and zero awareness that I was not supposed to feel this way or that anything was wrong. I would have described my feelings back then as “fine”. Of course, when you’re not aware of it, you can’t take steps to mitigate it and improve your life.
I think that you can be anxious and not understand the symptoms and therefore not understand that it is anxiety that you are experiencing. I do not think that it is possible to be anxious and not have symptoms.
Anxiety generally originates in childhood, as a result of either trauma, family-of-origin issues, or difficulties bonding with caregiving parent. Depending on the severity of the anxiety, people may not really be aware they have it unless/until it is so crippling that it makes it impossible to function. But it's most certainly possible to not realize you have it, especially if, in your first two years of life, you were repeatedly or continuously exposed to an environment where, in one way or another, for one reason or another, you did not feel completely safe. This impacts how your brain develops, which, in turn, increases susceptibility to anxiety.
Yes, I was not aware of my anxiety, I thought I just was caring about my health. But actually I was constantly worried about diseases: what if I have diabetes, what if I am losing hair, what if I have ALS or LS or cancer. Once I accidentally wounded while hurting an iron door and worried a lot about getting tetanus(I checked if I get vaccined and so on). I was not aware that it was anxiety, I recognized this was anxiety(actually a first subtle manifestation of OCD) only during therapy.
I had felt the effects of anxiety, but never understood what I was really feeling until I started going through therapy for another issue. I just thought that since I had always felt that way that it was normal. It was not until it really started to change the way that I was doing things that I realized that it was not normal.
In my childhood and early 20s I had a lot of anxiety, which is not nearly as bad these days. At the time I really did not know what it was that I was feeling but it was bad enough to be very impeding a lot of the time. It wasn’t till my mid 20s when I figured out what I was feeling was anxiety. It seems like a lot of it was general anxiety that seemed to not be strongly attached to anything specific but to everything at least a little. There have been several periods throughout my life where I think may I may have been bordering mild OCD. Most of the time it was centered on a perceived medical issue or something wrong my body. It would come on suddenly and go on for about 3 weeks then just fade away. Also had bad social anxiety but this felt different. I was very shy, nervous, felt self-conscious and embarrassed any little thing I thought I did wrong. All of this has improved considerably from what it was but it still creeps up ever now and then. In the past it seemed like I was felt the emotional part the most, but it seems like more lately there are times where it seems like I feel the physical effects of anxiety but not feel the emotional part of it. This is something that I am recently noticing and thing it may have been happening for the last few years but I don’t remember it from when I was younger. This is what brought on the original question in this post.