Anxiety: What Exactly Is it?

If you have an anxiety disorder or have previously experienced anxiety first hand, I reckon you can easily express how it makes you free in words based on your own personal experience. For that reason, I’ll just look into the peculiarity of anxiety and how it’s different from other conditions such as fear.

Anxiety is a psychological debilitating reaction that affects one’s entire being. It can cripple your ability to function well as a human being and deal with day-today situations. Unlike fear that is often directed to something external, e.g fear of spider or exams, anxiety is often internal, meaning that you can’t really put your finger on what you are anxious about.

Therefore, we can can define anxiety as an external response to internal emotional conflicts or tensions, which then produce an unpleasant state of uneasiness and nervousness. You will understand this definition as we go along.

By the way, I must mention that if your anxiety is not connected to anything in particular that you are aware of and just hits you out of the blue, this type of anxiety is what we refer to as panic attacks. It actually becomes a panic attack if your anxiety shows at least four of the following symptoms:

*Abdominal distress

*Irregular heartbeat

*Shaking

*Fear of losing control

*Numbness in the hands and feet

*Sweating

*Difficult in breathing

*Feeling of choking

*Tightness or pain in the chest

*Feeling faint and dizzy

*Feeling hot and cold

Of course, it is not only panic disorders that we have, regarding anxiety disorders. There are other outlets of anxiety that are common today. In my upcoming posts, I will be zooming in on various outlets of anxiety disorders and what you can start doing in order to beat them. But first let me quickly list some of the well known anxiety disorders:

Different Types of Anxiety Disorders

1. Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (OCD): This about having distressing thoughts, and images which you hardly can get rid of because they have become obsessive. For example, thoughts of harming somebody, blaspheming against God, getting contaminated, or inappropriate sexual thoughts or images.
2. Panic Disorder: As mentioned above, this is a sudden and intense anxiety that instantly affects both your mind and your body at the same time. And it’s accompanied by a number of physical symptoms which can really be debilitating and distressing.
3. Generalised Anxiety disorder (GAD): This is characterized by constant worrying about negative things happening and then getting worked up with the thoughts of preventing these imagined problems from happening. it comes with intense stress and inability to sleep. Imagine, if your mind can’t switch off worrying about everything, how do you think you’ll enjoy a lot of sleep?
4. Specific Phobias: This is an intense fear of a specific thing or situation, such as spider, an elevator, flying, driving, certain animals, etc.
5. Social Anxiety Disorders (SAD): This is an excessive fear of social situations. This is actually based on a subconscious belief of the sufferers that they are being constantly judged and criticized by others in social settings.This then leads to intense nervousness and unreasonable self-consciousness. This is also called social phobia.
6. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): This is about intense fear caused by one’s past traumatic experiences, such as brutal accidents, having being involved in a war, rape, etc. This often comes with series of flashbacks and nightmares, and sufferers are often highly susceptible to alcohol or drug abuse, in a quest to escape their intense fear, deep depression and a sense of hopeless.

Of course, there are other outlets which anxiety disorder can use to express itself, but these ones are the most common today.