Introduction
Every person feels anxious at some point in their life, whether it’s a final football match, a job interview, going on a date night, or giving a public speech for the first time.
Some anxiety in life is helpful- it helps us react appropriately to stresses or potential threats, by focusing our attention and quickening our reflexes. It usually settles once the stressful situation goes away.
Anxiety is when those feelings of fear and worry do not go away, they are extreme for the situation, and you can’t easily control them. When an anxiety condition is severe or presents all the time, it is hard for a person to go on with daily life activities.
Anxiety disorder is a mental health condition that occurs when feelings of worry, fear, or anxiety are significant enough to interfere with your everyday life.
The feelings of Anxiety in case of an anxiety disorder:
- Are quite intense or extreme
- Last for more than weeks, months, or can keep going on over many years
- Leave you feeling depressed or distressed and not enjoying life
- Negatively affect your general health, thoughts, and behavior
Anxiety can also cause moderate to severe physical symptoms like pain, stomach cramps, or a pounding heart. For some people, these physical symptoms can be the primary concern.
Anxiety also affects your life, such as your ability to cope, perform at college or work, and adversely affect your relationships with family, friends, and other near ones.
It is sometimes common for people with anxiety to feel depressed. The symptoms of both anxiety and depression can overlap.
Signs and Symptoms of Anxiety Disorder
Continually worrying and other symptoms of anxiety can creep up on you gradually. It also makes it hard to know how much worrying is too much.
Some common symptoms of anxiety include:
- Shaking
- Hot and cold flushes
- Struggling to breathe
- Racing heart
- Tingling in the chest or chest pain
- A racing mind filled with thoughts
- Snowballing worries that keep getting bigger
- Persistent worrying ideas that seem “crazy or silly.”
- A constant need to check things are clean or right
If a person has any of the above symptoms, they might want to look at the different types of anxiety disorders explained below.
Types of Anxiety
Here are different kinds of anxiety disorders; however, do not diagnose your anxiety just by reading the information given below. For proper diagnosis and determination of your anxiety disorder, visit a specialist. You might find this information useful when you visit a doctor.
There are numerous kinds of anxiety disorders. Given below are the anxiety disorders that are most commonly found in the people of the United States.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Generalized anxiety disorder or GAD is when people start worrying about several things on a day-to-day basis for more than six months. It generally affects younger adults, and usually women more than men. The anxiety in this type of anxiety disorder is all about general life circumstances and a wide range of situations and issues, and not just a particular event. It may be hard to control generalized anxiety as it makes its way into daily life.
Phobias
Phobias are irrational and extreme fears about a specific thing. The fear or worry can be so high that the person goes to a great extent to avoid it, even when it is harmless. For example, social phobias are the fear of being embarrassed or judged in public, even in everyday situations like while eating, speaking, or walking in public places. The people living with social phobia can also fear or worry about morning small-talks.
Another type of phobia that is commonly found in people is agoraphobia. It is the fear of open spaces or closed places. It is mainly a fear of being locked in, or away from a safe person or place. It can be extremely frightening and disabling and can make people unable to leave their homes.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD is when a person has intrusive, unwanted, persistent, or repetitive thoughts, ideas, feelings, or obsessions, which cause anxiety. Then they carry out actions to get rid of those thoughts and reduce anxiety. For example, a person may be afraid of germs and try to may try to relieve anxiety through repeated handwashing or not touching things like doorknobs.
The person may know that these thoughts are unreasonable but not be able to stop them. When your OCD is severe, and you leave it untreated, it can be very distressing and get in your daily work, school, or college life, and healthy living at home.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder, otherwise called PTSD, can be defined as a reaction to a stressful event outside the range of daily life experiences when a person feels very threatened or unsafe. These are rare and unusual experiences, such as a massive car accident, a violent attack, a war, a verbal, physical, or sexual attack assault, or some natural disaster.
Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms include irritability, flashbacks, anxiety, nightmares, and avoiding situations that might bring memories of the event.
Panic Disorder
Panic disorder is a very prevalent type of anxiety disorder. More than 30% of the total population of the United States suffers from panic disorder. It happens when a person has a panic attack. Panic attacks would be intense and extreme feelings of anxiety and fear along with some physical symptoms and overwhelming sensations that a person has if they were in great danger, such as feeling faint, pounding heart, sweating, nausea, shaky limbs, discomfort in breathing, chest pain, and feelings of losing control. The symptoms occur and peak quickly. The effects can be severe enough for a person experiencing a panic attack to think that they are dying. Despite being very uncomfortable and frightening, they are not life-threatening.
Treatment of Anxiety Disorder
Effective treatment techniques help you learn how to control your anxiety to make yourself comfortable and healthy again. The type of treatment you should follow depends upon the kind of anxiety you have.
For mild symptoms of anxiety, a doctor may suggest lifestyle changes like regular physical exercise and reduction of stress levels. You may also try therapies and other means to reduce and deal with your anxiety.
When the symptoms of anxiety are moderate to severe, medical, or psychological treatment options could be the best choice for the management and treatment of anxiety disorders.
Psychological Treatment
Psychological treatments are also known as talking therapies. They can help you change your thinking pattern, so you can keep control of your anxiety and reduce irrational fears and worries.
There are several different types of effective psychological treatments for the management of anxiety. Some people prefer to work on one with a professional, while others may choose to go out for a group therapy session.
The different types of psychological therapies useful in anxiety treatment are:
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy: CBT is a structured psychological therapy that recognizes that the way we think or cognition and how we act or behave affects the way we feel. The therapy involves working with a professional therapist to identify the patterns of thoughts and behavior that make you more likely to become anxious or stop you from getting better once you are feeling anxious.
- Behavior Therapy: behavior therapy is a significant component of CBT, but unlike cognitive behavior therapy, it doesn’t attempt to change attitudes and beliefs. Instead, behavior therapy focuses on encouraging activities that are pleasant, rewarding, or give a sense of satisfaction, to reverse the patterns of worry that make anxiety worse.
Medical Treatment
Researches show that psychological therapies are the most effective and safe treatment options for people suffering from anxiety. However, if anxiety is severe medical treatments may be helpful.
- Antidepressants: some antidepressant medications help people to manage anxiety, even when they are not experiencing symptoms of depression. Several research pieces indicate that when people have an anxiety disorder, some changes occur in the brain chemicals called dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline. Antidepressant medications balance the chemical messages between the neurons (nerve cells) and the brain.
- Benzodiazepines: benzodiazepines, also called minor tranquilizers or sleeping pills, are the medications commonly prescribed for the treatment of anxiety disorder symptoms in the short term. They promote relaxation and reduce anxiety, but are not for long-term use as they can reduce attention, affect coordination, and be addictive. However, benzodiazepines like Xanax are the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States for the effective short-term treatment of anxiety disorder symptoms.
Anxiety Management of Anxiety Disorder
There is a range of procedures you can attempt to deal with your anxiety. What works is diverse for everybody, and it can take some effort to discover the methods that work best for you. But remember, if your anxiety is demonstrating hard to oversee, look for help from a professional doctor.
10 strategies to manage anxiety
- Slow breathing: When you’re on edge, your breath turns out to be quicker and shallower. Attempt intentionally hindering your breathing. Consider three you take in gradually – at that point, consider three you inhale out slowly.
- Locate a peaceful area: Close your eyes and progressively tense and afterward loosen up every one of your muscle bunches from your toes to your head. Hold the strain for three seconds, and after that, discharge rapidly. This can help decrease the sentiments of muscle pressure that regularly accompanies anxiety.
- Remain calm: Anxiety can make your considerations live in a horrendous future that hasn’t occurred. Attempt to take yourself back to where you are. Rehearsing reflection can help.
- Healthy lifestyle: Keeping dynamic, eating admirably, going out into nature, investing energy with loved ones, decreasing pressure, and doing the exercises you appreciate are compelling in diminishing anxiety and improving your prosperity.
- Take small acts of bravery: Maintaining a strategic distance from what makes you on edge gives some help for the time being; however, it can make you increasingly on the side in the long haul. Take a stab at moving toward something that makes you on edge – even in a little manner. The path through anxiety is discovering that what you dread isn’t probably going to occur – and if it does, you’ll have the option to adapt to it.
- Challenge your self-talk: How you think influences how you feel. Anxiety can make you overestimate the threat in a circumstance and disparage your capacity to deal with it. Attempt to consider various translations to an event that is making you on edge instead of hopping to the direst outcome imaginable. Take a gander at the realities for and against your idea being valid.
- Plan stress time: It’s challenging to quit stressing, so put aside some an ideal opportunity to enjoy your concerns. Indeed, even 10 minutes each night to record or go over them in your mind can help prevent your worries from taking over on different occasions.
- Become acquainted with your anxiety: Keep a journal of when it’s busy’s ideal – and most exceedingly awful. Discover the examples and plan your week – or day – to proactively deal with your anxiety.
- Learn from others: Conversing with other people who likewise experience anxiety or experiencing something comparable can help you feel less alone. Visit our Online Forums to associate with others.
- Be kind to yourself: Recall that you are not your anxiety. You are not frail. You are not mediocre. You just have a psychological health condition. It’s called anxiety.