Rachael Kane

ANXIETY

Anxiety is a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear, and can be mild or severe. It can have many causes, such as pressure of work or family problems. Everyone feels anxious sometimes but having an anxiety disorder means that someone feels anxious at inappropriate times and finds it difficult to control their worries.

People with anxiety disorders may feel apprehensive and tense. These feelings may be experienced not as emotions but as physical symptoms such as butterflies or cramps in the stomach, trembling, a fast heartbeat and/or sweating. Often the cause of these feelings, both physical and emotional is unclear and people may think they are going mad, losing control or fainting. Other people fear that they may suffocate or have a heart attack or stroke, or that they have some other serious illness. Although understandable, such fears are groundless. People can often experience sleep difficulties and recurring nightmares.

TYPES OF ANXIETY

There are a number of anxiety disorders that can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Those that are covered here are panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Anxiety and Panic (Panic Disorder)

People with panic disorder sometimes feel panicky or anxious and may make changes to their life in order to avoid situations that make them feel this way. They will not have these symptoms all of the time. People with panic disorder sometimes also fear or avoid public spaces (this is known as agoraphobia). Sometimes a person experiencing a panic attack may go to a hospital casualty department fearing that they are having a heart attack because their heart rate is so high.

Generalised Anxiety Disorder

People with generalised anxiety disorder have symptoms most of the time. These symptoms vary with different individuals but they include feeling constantly edgy, irritable or worried, having difficulty concentrating or having trouble sleeping.

People with an anxiety disorder may withdraw from social contact – for example, from family and friends, in an effort to avoid these feelings. They may find it difficult or stressful to go to work, and may take time off sick. This can create a fear of being judged unfairly, which can increase the person’s own lack of self esteem and understanding of what is happening to them.

Acute Stress Disorder

Acute stress disorder (also known as acute stress reaction) is a psychological condition arising in response to a terrifying or traumatic event. This condition is unrelated to the circulatory condition shock. The person can experience extreme, disturbing or unexpected fear, stress or pain, and that involves or threatens serious injury, perceived serious injury or death to themselves or someone else. Acute stress reaction is a variation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and is the mind and body’s response to feelings (both perceived and real) of intense helplessness.

Some of the symptoms of acute stress disorder are numbing, detachment, derealization, depersonalization or dissociative amnesia, continued re-experiencing of the event by such ways as thoughts, dreams, and flashbacks; and avoidance of any stimulation that reminds them of the event. During this time, they experience symptoms of anxiety, and significant impairment in at least one essential area of functioning. Symptoms last for a minimum of 2 days, and a maximum of 4 weeks, and occur within 4 weeks of the event.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event resulting in psychological trauma. This event may involve the threat of death to oneself or to someone else, or to one’s own or someone else’s physical, sexual or psychological integrity, overwhelming the individual’s ability to cope. As an effect of psychological trauma, PTSD is less frequent and more enduring than the more commonly seen acute stress response. These persisting posttraumatic stress symptoms cause significant disruptions of one or more important areas of life function. It has three sub-forms: acute, chronic, and delayed-onset.

Social anxiety

Social anxiety is anxiety (emotional discomfort, fear, apprehension or worry) about social situations, interactions with others, and being evaluated or scrutinized by other people. The difference between social anxiety and normal apprehension of social situations is that social anxiety involves an intense feeling of fear in social situations, especially situations that are unfamiliar or in which you will be watched or evaluated by others. The feeling of fear is so strong that in these types of situations you may be so worried that you feel anxious just thinking about them and will go to great lengths to avoid them.

Specific Phobia

A specific phobia is a generic term for any kind of anxiety disorder that amounts to an unreasonable or irrational fear that relates to exposure to specific objects or situations. As a result, the affected persons tend to actively avoid direct contact with the objects or situation and, in severe cases, any mention or depiction of them. The fear or anxiety may be triggered both by the presence and the anticipation of the specific object or situation.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a form of anxiety that involves unwanted, intrusive thoughts that can range from annoying to frightening to repulsive, and even disturbingly bizarre. Because these thoughts are so difficult to get out of one’s mind they are called “obsessive” thoughts. At their core, obsessive thoughts often involve relatively normal concerns, reactions, worries, and fears that get blown out of proportion.

Actions taken to stop obsessive thoughts are referred to as “compulsions” or “rituals” because the person feels compelled to carry them out to neutralize the thoughts and reduce the accompanying anxious feelings. Compulsions can be thoughts as well as behaviours.

If you think you might have OCD, there are a few things you need to know. Firstly that it is highly treatable and secondly, that getting better comes down to rewiring a part of your brain that only learns by doing.