What is Anxiety
Anxiety is associated with intensive, persistent, and excessive fear typically about everyday issues or situations. The physical symptoms of anxiety often are fast heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, fatigue and restlessness. Patients may also experience nausea, palpitations and insomnia.
Cognitively, people with anxiety may have difficulties concentrating and having racing and unwanted thoughts. They may also be irritable and hypervigilant as they anticipate impending doom.
Types of Anxiety Disorders
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): Symptoms of GAD include exaggerated worry about everyday life. Once a worry is resolved often the anxiety jumps to something else. This type of worry often causes exhaustion, headaches, tension and nausea.
- Social Anxiety Disorder: This disorder causes intense fear of social situations. This fear is often driven by a fear of being humiliated routinely and demanding reassurance.
- Panic Disorder: This disorder is characterized by sudden feelings of terror sometimes occurring without warning. Panic attacks often have strong physical symptoms that may include chest pains, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, and an upset stomach.
- Phobias: For those who struggle with phobia certain, places, events or objects cause a powerful reaction based on irrational fears. This intensive fear leads to an avoidance of the trigger. The average age of onset for phobias is 7 years of age.
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD):This disorder is characterized by unreasonable thoughts and fears which are called obsessions that lead to repetitive behaviors called compulsions. A person may try to ignore their obsessions but this only leads to increasing distress and anxiety. The person feels compelled to engage in compulsive behaviors to minimize the anxiety. Some examples of compulsive behaviors include washing or cleaning, checking, counting, orderliness, following a strict routine and demanding reassurance.
More About Anxiety
It’s not uncommon for someone with an anxiety disorder to also struggle with depression. Nearly half of those diagnosed with depression also have an anxiety disorder.
Most if not all people experience transient anxiety but over a third will experience an anxiety disorder sometime in their lives.
Most people develop symptoms of anxiety prior to 21 years of age
Treatment
Fortunately anxiety disorders are very treatable and there are many things that you can do to minimize your experience of anxiety. Treatment typically includes psychotherapy and in some instances the use of medication.