Anxiety Disorders
Generalized Anxiety Disorder is much more than the normal anxiety people experience day-to-day. It’s ever present and fills one’s day with exaggerated worry and tension, even though there is little or nothing to provoke it. People with anxiety disorder may understand that their reactions aren’t logical, but they cannot control their thoughts or feelings. Symptoms can arise without warning.
Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder include:
- Anticipation of disaster
- Worrying excessively about health, money, family, or work
- Feeling overwhelmed by daily routines or tasks
- Inability to overcome concerns — concerns may intensify as time passes
- Difficulty relaxing and easily startled, hard to fall or stay asleep
- Difficulty concentrating
- Physical symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, muscle tension, muscle aches, difficulty swallowing, trembling, twitching, irritability, sweating, hot flashes, light-headedness, shortness of breath, nausea, frequent urination
Sometimes anxiety is identified by one of the following types of anxiety disorders
- Panic Disorder — characterized by feelings of terror with no apparent reason. The anxiety manifests in a true physical experience similar to a heart attack that comes with no warning. Other symptoms include heart palpitations, sweating, extreme fear.
- Phobias — a deep-seated fear that is attached to a situation or activity. This fear exists despite a real threat or rational explanation.
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) — Obsessions (repeated, upsetting thoughts and images) consume an individual’s thinking, leading to engagement in repetitive behaviors (compulsions) in an attempt to reduce anxiety.
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — Survivors of disaster, or trauma re-experience the event in flashbacks, nightmares and involuntary remembrances often triggering the same physical symptoms they experienced during the incident.
An anxiety disorder is usually accompanied by another problem such as depression, substance abuse, an eating disorder or another anxiety disorder (i.e. social phobia or panic disorder). Ideally, these problems should be treated at the same time. As with most mental illnesses, a combination of medication and psychotherapy is often effective. All categories of anxiety disorder are treatable.