Anxiety Disorder
Anxiety: experiencing intermittent anxiety is a natural part of life. However, people with anxiety disorders regularly experience intense, insistent, and extreme worry and fear about their daily lives. This intense, insistent, and extreme worry dominates individuals’ lives to the extent that they are mentally paralyzed and unable to participate in or enjoy their daily activities. Regularly, anxiety disorder involves recurrent outbreaks of impulsive feelings of extreme anxiety and fear or terror that reach a topmost within minutes, causing panic attacks.
Anxiety disorders interfere with individuals’ daily activities, including the inability to function at work or complete activities of daily living. The feelings are difficult to control, out of proportion to the actual danger, and can last long without proper and immediate support. People suffering from anxiety disorder may avoid places or situations to keep their unpleasant feelings under control.
Symptoms of anxiety disorder may start during early childhood or teen years and continue into adulthood. Examples of anxiety disorders may include generalized anxiety disorder, specific phobias, social anxiety disorder, and separation anxiety disorder.
Regardless of the form of anxiety you may have, there are evidence-based treatment approaches that can help you lead a normal life.
Some Common Symptoms of Anxiety Disorder Include:
- Sweating
- Gastrointestinal (GI) problems
- Rapid breathing
- Increased heart rate
- Imminent sense of danger, doom or panic
- An intense feeling of restlessness and nervousness
- Inability to concentrate on a task
- Shivering and tremulous
- Feeling of weakness or tiredness
- Difficulties focusing on anything else except present worry
- Difficulties with sleep
- Trouble controlling worry
- Strong urge to avoid things that trigger anxiety
Detailed Types of Anxiety Disorders:
- Generalized anxiety disorder: insistent and excessive anxiety that comes along with a strong sense of worry about activities or events, including regular and routine activities. The anxiety is incomparable to the precipitating circumstance, and it’s often difficult to control and affects how individuals feel physically.
- Panic disorder: characterized by recurrent episodes of sudden feelings of intense anxiety and fear that often reach a peak within a short time. Individuals may have unfounded feelings of imminent doom, causing shortness of breath, chest pain, or a rapid quivering or pounding heart. These panic attacks may lead to worrying about them happening again or avoiding situations in which they’ve occurred.
- Agoraphobia: is a type of anxiety disorder that is characterized by fear and often avoiding places or situations that might cause an individual to panic and feel trapped, and helpless.
- Separation anxiety disorder: this type of anxiety is common among children and individuals living with borderline personality disorder (BPD). It is often characterized by excessive fear of abandonment or separation from parents or others who have parental or intimate roles.
- Anxiety disorder due to a medical condition: often characterized by symptoms of extreme anxiety or panic that are directly triggered by physical health Issues.
- Social anxiety disorder: includes high levels of anxiety, distress, and evasion of social situations due to feelings of shame, self-consciousness, and worry about being judged or viewed undesirably by others.
- Specific phobias: often characterized by major anxiety when an individual is exposed to a specific situation or object and presents with a desire to avoid it – this type of Phobia provokes panic attacks in some people.
- Substance-induced anxiety disorder: this type of anxiety is characterized by symptoms of extreme anxiety or panic that are directly a result of abuse of drugs, taking medications, being exposed to toxic substances, or withdrawal from drug abuse.
- Selective mutism: unswerving failure of children to speak in certain settings, such as school, yet they can and are comfortable speaking in other settings such as community events, parks, yoga, gym, and at home. Selective mutism can affect children’s performance in school by interfering with their ability to function effectively with others.
