Anxiety

What is anxiety?

You have likely heard of the “fight or flight” reaction. Anxiety is your body’s way of protecting you from life-threatening situations. I believe that people are not born anxious, but that anxiety is learned in both positive and negative ways. As a positive, anxiety is a healthy response essential for survival.

When learned in a negative way, it morphs into anxiety disorder, when you react to distorted, intrusive thoughts on an ongoing basis. Anxiety symptoms can include excessive worry, fear, avoidance, and sometimes, compulsive rituals. People generally seek help when symptoms start to impact their daily lives.

What you think about your world, self, experience, and future is at the core of how you experience the world, and therefore, how you behave or react in certain situations.

I can help you identify those ongoing thoughts and then shift them, which in turn can reshape your behavior and reactions. Without professional intervention, your anxiety will only get worse.

Anxiety comes in many forms, such as those described below.

When you have panic disorder you get panic attacks. These attacks of fear come on suddenly, can reoccur, cannot be predicted, and can last several minutes, sometimes longer. You fear disaster or loss of control when there is no real danger.

You may have a strong physical reaction – sweating, nausea, stomach pain, choking, dizziness, numbness or tingling in your hands, or a sense of having a heart attack. And you may develop intense anxiety about when the next attack will occur.

Social anxiety disorder causes you to have an unreasonable and excessive fear of being in social situations. You are afraid of being judged or criticized. You fear being humiliated or embarrassed. You may avoid social gatherings, and when you do go, you feel a great deal of distress.

You may worry about impending social situations, perhaps for weeks in advance; this is anticipatory anxiety. Specific situations that spark your social anxiety might include: using public toilets, asking questions, working or speaking in front of others, or eating or drinking in front of others.

A person with generalized anxiety disorder worries all the time about many different things such as work, finances, health, or family, even when there is no or very little cause. The worry is hard to control, even when you know it’s irrational.

You may have other symptoms, like restlessness, irritability, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and muscle tension.

When you have specific phobias you are irrationally afraid of objects or situations such as spiders, dogs, heights, or blood injections. While most people might have some distaste for certain things, someone with specific phobias reacts much more intensely. You go to great lengths to avoid the thing you fear.

Specific phobia differs from social phobia in that social phobia deals with social fear and accompanying evaluation, while specific phobia targets objects or situations.

 It is normal to have to get through hard times like bereavement and then move on with your life. But sometimes after a particular shattering event you will continue to relive it along with the persistent and terrifying thoughts that surrounded it. Some have flashbacks and nightmares. If the condition lasts for over a month, you are said to have post traumatic stress disorder. This is serious and can be debilitating.

Other PTSD symptoms include avoidance and emotional numbing. Generally you will experience emotional numbing just after the event – a way of coping. And then, you avoid things that might remind you of the trauma. You may also experience insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and possible increased aggression.

Please contact me for an appointment or more information