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Practical Facts about Anxiety Disorders
What are Anxiety Disorders?
Anxiety disorders refer to a group of mental health disorders which all in some way share similar symptoms. These symptoms include intense feelings of fear, apprehension and nervousness. Individuals who have a diagnosed Anxiety Disorder report extreme difficulties in controlling their fear, worry, anxiety, and thoughts. All anxiety disorders are based around the primary emotion of fear, and this fear creates a cascade of changes to a person’s mood, thinking, behavior, and to their physical body.
To some degree, we all share some symptoms of anxiety disorders. Fear in dangerous situations, anxiety before tests, worrying about a sick friend, are all normal experiences of anxiety. Someone diagnosed with an anxiety disorder will experience the symptoms more intensely and the symptoms last longer than “normal” fear or anxiety reactions. In order to receive a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder, the anxiety-related symptoms must cause the person significant distress as well as impact that person’s functioning, such as being able to go out in public or accomplish basic activities of daily living.
Anxiety disorders involve changes in the way someone behaves, sensations in the body, and the way that people think. Someone with an anxiety disorder with oftentimes practice avoidance, which is a key symptom in most anxiety disorder. This symptoms causes people to stay away from certain places, people, situations and things due to fear and worry that something bad will happen. For example, someone with a Social Anxiety Disorder often will avoid social situations in which the person is likely to be around people they don’t know or large groups of people. Someone with a phobia might avoid the thing that they are specifically afraid of. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can cause the opposite, with individuals feeling compelled to act in certain ways or do certain things.
Anxiety can cause changes in the nervous system which create a variety of uncomfortable and distressing sensations in the body. The most common types of changes that occur with anxiety disorder are increased heart rate, increased breathing or hyperventilation, sensation that the person is choking or can’t breathe, nausea, dizziness, hot flashes, chills, and tingling. These sensations and changes can be linked to response in the nervous system, brain and hormonal system. However, someone with an anxiety disorder is unable to effectively cope with these bodily changes and often feels at the mercy of their anxiety.
Someone with an anxiety disorder will often experience changes in their thought patterns which can make symptoms considerably worse over time. For example,
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