Understanding Anxiety

Understanding Anxiety

As long as we continue to suffer, strive or struggle as each day passes, we must experience anxiety. Anxiety can be defined as a mental tension which manifests itself in irritability, worry, uneasiness or apprehension. You can get anxiety as a result of uncertainty about your future or some impending events, or because you are unable to control your environment, state of your mind or affairs. Anxiety is a human being’s natural emotional response because of his endeavor to live and survive comfortably. Anxiety is your constant reminder that you have appalling frailty and an utter impotence to master your own destiny.

Although anxiety is closely related to fear, they are not mere synonymous words. You can define fear as both the emotional and psychological response to your sense of being in danger. This means that you are using fear basically as your survival mechanism to promote your self-preservation. However, anxiety is the warning signal of your increasing survival impotence. You can describe anxiety simply as "fear spread out thin."

How Anxiety Can Affect You.

Anxiety can affect and cost you extremely much because its effects are intense and far-reaching. We can put these effects into 3 fundamental categories: the physical, the social and the psycho-emotional categories Let us take them one after the other.

Physical Category.

Anxiety can produce a series of physiological discomforts. We can label a particular manifestation of anxiety under what we call psychosomatic symptoms, like palpitations of your heart, an upset of your stomach, a headache, a muscle cramp, or various kinds of body aches and pains. Chronic or sustained anxiety can put you in a deteriorating physical health condition. There are other long-term effects which are classified under functional and organic illnesses, such as dyspepsia and heart disease.

Social Category.

Anxiety can also strain your social relationships and retard your interpersonal development. If you are an extremely anxious person, you may have the tendency to avoid your social contacts, even your familiar friends, because you want to reduce your anxiety level. Social contacts have the tendency to produce feelings of uneasiness, suspicion and uncertainty, and your natural reaction to all these will make you alienated or socially withdrawn. That is why extremely anxious people learn to avoid people and live alone.

Psycho-emotional category.

Anxiety may also lead you to psycho-emotional disorders which can be serious. At first, anxiety reduces your performance by restricting your reasoning abilities, making you dull or limiting your imaginative thinking, and causing you general discouragement. Feelings of disorientation and depression may then ensue. Personality maladjustments are the eventuality.

6 Shocking Facts about Anxiety You Might Not Know. 

Below is a list of interesting facts about anxiety that you might not know:

1. Forms of anxiety like worry, fear, pains or muscle aches can rapidly shallow your breathing, increase your heart palpitations, cause you fatigue or headaches. These are some of the most common complaints often heard by doctors. But anxiety can do even worse, like worsen or provoke alcoholism, make you over-eat, cause bowel irritation, premenstrual problem, and several other medical ailments.

2. The number of women suffering from anxiety is more than twice the number of men. This reason for this, according to experts, is either that, women are somewhat more likely to have anxiety, or that men are more likely to pretend they are not afraid.

3. According to a research study, more than 65 million people living in the united States experience some anxiety symptoms; 30 million of them have a full-blown anxiety disorder.

4. 1 out of every 2 people living in the United States will have mild to moderate anxiety for at least 2 weeks in their lifetime; 1 out of every 4 people will suffer from an anxiety disorder.

5. It was discovered from a recent poll that more than 25 percent of the United States workforce is suffering from chronic stress and anxiety.

6. A research study has shown that a lot more people are suffering from anxiety than people suffering from other mental health ailments, and that less than 25 percent of them will be able to receive adequate help. These 25 percent will suffer unnecessarily from a curable and treatable anxiety condition.

Destructive Anxiety Disorders and Symptoms.

I have listed and explained below the top 5 types of destructive anxiety disorders and symptoms that affect millions of people in the U.S and other parts of the world. You should know about them because they can directly impact your life or those of your loved ones negatively and can be very destructive.

1. Anxiety Attacks: This type makes you feel suddenly like you are about to die, go crazy, pass out, or even lose control. This type of disorder is often called PD (an abbreviation for Panic Disorder).

2. Compulsions: This type gives you an urge to carry out certain rituals like repeatedly washing things, counting things in a particular way, praying, or repeating certain words silently. This type of destructive disorder is called OCD (meaning Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

3. Appearance Concerns: When you are attacked by this type, you feel very convinced that something is grotesque or abnormal about your appearance, although other people cannot see it. This one is called BDD (Body Dysmorphic Disorder).

4. Obsession Attack: An attack of this type gives you some upsetting thoughts you cannot get rid of, for example, fear of losing control and doing harm to others, confession of a crime you did not commit, contamination by germs or dirt. This type is also called OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

5. Chronic Worrying: This particular type makes you constantly worry about your work, health, family, finances or school. It is also called GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder).