Anxiety disorders are part of mental disorders. They result in a generalized feeling of worry, anxiety, irrelevant or disproportionate. This feeling lasts for more than 6 months and hinders the person in his daily life. Anxiety disorders are disabling for the person who may isolate themselves or develop other disorders such as depression. The stress felt is not proportional to the events experienced or to their potential danger.
Anxiety disorder requires specific and adapted management by mental health professionals. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is anxiety disorder with a more specific purpose. Not to be confused with stress. This state is the adaptation of the organism to a stimulus, a reaction of the organism in the face of an aggression. In small doses, it can be a motor. For the anxiety help this is important.
Generalized anxiety
It is a state of excessive and permanent worry. The tension is psychic and physical, invasive and impossible to control, even if the individual is aware of the disproportion of his permanent concerns.
Performance anxiety
It is linked to assessment situations: exams, sporting events, recruitment interview. If it can push to surpass oneself, it can also, in some people, cause distress and a disabling fear of failure. It is accompanied by sleep disturbances. Everything is back to normal once the test is over.
Symptoms
Disabling in everyday life, especially in social, emotional and professional relationships, anxiety also has consequences on health. Because exaggerated worry and a tendency to dwell on it are not the only manifestations of anxiety.
Physical symptoms indeed accompany this pathological state of mind:
- Difficulty falling asleep.
- Muscle aches.
- Sweaty hands, sweats, chills, dizziness.
- Headache or stomach ache.
- Diarrhea or constipation.
- Impression of suffocation.
- Knot in throat or stomach.
- Constant urge to urinate.
Generally, it is the expression of these physical symptoms that prompts the patient to consult. He thinks, and it is quite natural, to be suffering from an organic disease. After auscultation and examinations by the general practitioner, this one can lead to the diagnosis of anxiety.
Here are some examples of anxious reasoning:
- Thinking that it is always on you that it falls.
- Tendency to want too much control, not to leave room for the unexpected.
- Draw conclusions without proof.
- Focus on a detail and forget the general context.
- Generalize from an event.
- Exaggerate the consequences of a fact.
- Make the wrong associations between things.
To find out if your anxiety is normal or not, ask yourself these three questions:
- Am I anxious about things that are unimportant or even for no reason?
- Does my anxiety bother me in everyday life?
- Can I control my anxiety and let go of it whenever I want?
If the answer is yes then to the first two questions and no to the last, you have higher than normal level of anxiety, which does not necessarily mean that you are sick. Only you are naturally very anxious.