What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is often experienced when you are faced with something that could be dangerous, difficult, embarrassing or stressful. In fact, anything might be experienced as anxiety producing if it presents a change in one way or another from your ‘normal’ pattern of living.
These anxious moments might include feeling upset and tense, increased pulse rate, or ‘butterflies’ in the stomach, and you could feel sweaty or shaky. Without these body and mind changes, you would lack the physical conditions necessary for the high intensity effort and focused activity that many stressful events demand.
For people with an anxiety disorder however, these feelings are present much of the time, causing considerable distress and making even simple daily tasks appear impossible.
A diagnosis is given when the anxiety and panic symptoms get in the way of daily activities and stop people doing what they want to do. Anxiety disorders can affect a range of areas in an individual’s life.
The following represent the more common anxiety and panic diagnoses:
Generalised Anxiety DisorderGeneralised Anxiety Disorder involves excessive and persistent worry regarding a range of issues that may include financial, work or personal relationships.
Panic Disorder
Panic Disorder involves an extreme sense of fear/panic that may be connected to seemingly harmless situations. People who suffer from panic disorder experience a range of especially intrusive physical symptoms including faintness, blushing, rapid heart rate, hyperventilation, sweating, abdominal and chest pain. These symptoms will also be accompanied by a sense that something terrible is about to happen.
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is associated with feelings of intense anxiety that arise as the individual perceives they are unable to get away from certain places such as crowds, lifts or public transport. People with agoraphobia will often avoid these places because they fear they may have a panic attack and be unable to receive help.
Specific Phobias
Specific Phobias are intense fears and subsequent avoidance of objects or situations. Examples may include intense fear and avoidance of spiders, seeing blood, getting injections or flying. The avoidance of these phobic situations or objects may then interfere with work or leisure and lead to constriction of activity or lifestyle.
Social Phobia
Social Phobia involves intense fear of social contact or interaction due to anxiety associated with imagined negative evaluation. As a result of this particular fear of negative evaluation, people with social phobia will avoid social contact leading again to a constriction in the work or lifestyle choices available to them.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is accompanied by constant and unwanted thoughts which often result in the creation of elaborate rituals (i.e., hand-washing or counting) in an attempt to control those persistent thoughts (i.e., fears of contamination).
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