What is Anxiety
Generally, you may feel anxious about job, money, interviews, marriage, about somebody into the family for a particular aspect. But if you think too much, worry about a particular event or situation beyond need of it falling into the category of anxiety and it’s a very harmful condition to make you to visit psychologist.
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
Excessive worry disorder is a case of excessive thinking and anxiety and might show
Some of these symptoms listed below:
- Sleep problems
- Muscle tension
- Irritability
- Difficulty focusing
- Frequent fatigue
- Restlessness
It might last for 6 months or more and sometimes might be difficult to control and impact a person’s daily life in a harmful way.
Reason for Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): There can be one or multiple reasons such as habitual tendency to get anxious or Stressful or abusive environment, unresolved trauma. Even due to modern lifestyle of keeping up with deadlines, social media, fast pace of life often causes anxiety called free-floating anxiety. Some causes are listed below:
Physical causes: diabetes, heart diseases, hyperthyroidism, and respiratory issues are prone to anxiety.
Traumas: Traumas and any kind of abuse physical or mental easily leads a path towards anxiety, fear and phobias. Loss of a loved one, financial losses, or a chronic disease are a suitable cause.
Substance abuse: Addiction of alcohol or drugs have high chances of developing anxiety. Even after withdrawing from the addiction also causes anxiety, fear and phobia.
Any type of Stress in regular life either due to workplace or family conflicts can build up to become a serious psychological issue. This could be due to work pressure, or family conflicts or financial challenges.
Medications: Some medications or even nutritional supplements can sometimes result in side effects causing psychological issues.
How you can be helped about anxiety disorders
You should not take anxiety in a light mood. This can be the root cause of many diseases, phobias and panic attacks, obsessions and compulsions and PTSD and depression.
You will have to approach right therapists. Deep breathing, meditation, exercises and assertive communication help you cope with your symptoms of anxiety.
Signals to make you realize that you need counselling:
- Shortness of breath
- Inconsistency of speech
- Trouble concentrating
- Frequent trembling and sweating
- Increased heart rate
- Difficulty to control worry
- Gastrointestinal (GI) issues
- Avoiding things that result in panic attacks
Types of anxiety disorders:
Anxiety disorders are listed as:
Separation anxiety: When you do not want to leave a comfortable state such as not willing to leave home or parents for any purpose.
Selective mutism: When you choose to keep yourself mute in some situations and this causes issues with your academics, social space, work.
Panic: sufferings from recurring panic attacks, including physical symptoms of anxiety.
Specific phobias: Fear of certain objects or situations and desire to avoid is called phobias. Social anxiety: Fear and desire to avoid social situations because of feeling anxiety out of proportion.
Agoraphobia: it is fear of closed space and also person might feel uncomfortable in open space too, in leaving one’s house or using a public transport or being in crowd. Medication/substance-induced anxiety: The situation can be caused by exposure of certain substances like alcohol, caffeine etc., and sometimes from some medications also.
Treating anxiety disorders with therapy
Psychological therapy can help you get rid of panic attacks, obsessive thoughts, unrelenting worries, or an incapacitating phobia. Therapy is very effective option and helps you to uncover the reasons for fear, teaches you to cope with the situations, makes you feel relax, gives you a better problem-solving approach and assess your situation with a different lookout.
For different type of anxiety disorder different approaches are adopted. Treatment for OCD (obsessive -compulsive disorder) is different than panic attacks. Duration of treatment may also differ, but in most of the cases, in 8 to 10 weeks significant improvements are being seen. There are many approaches to resolve your anxiety issue but one of the most important type is CBT (Cognitive Behavioural therapy), which can be used alone or in combination of other types. It helps in lowering your anxiety level, calm your mind and overcome your fears.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) works on your thought pattern and perception of the situation and addresses negative patterns in thoughts not external events. It comprises of two parts.
Cognitive therapy to understand the negative patterns in thoughts contributing to anxiety, fear and phobia.
Behavioural therapy to understand your behaviour and reactions to such triggering events.
People react differently with different emotions for the same situation depending upon our individual expectations, attitudes, and beliefs. This therapy identifies our negative thinking pattern and corrects them. Changing your style of thinking can make you feel differently and more aptly to the same situations in different times.
CBT restructures your thoughts in three steps and also called thought challenging.
Negative thinking is a part of lifelong habit and it takes a while to break and change the habit for positivity.
Steps CBT follows is first recognizing the state of anxiousness. Next to learning coping skills and relaxation to deal with anxiety and panic and then confronting your fears.
Systematic desensitization
This is an approach to make you face the situations you fear in a systematic manner step by step. Like you might have fear from height or from public speaking and in that case, you will be required to face mild situations initially by either imagining or confronting in real life. Slowly you will feel gaining control over the fear situations. This is called systematic desensitization. This can be used alone or in conjunction with CBT.
Steps for systematic desensitization of anxiety disorder consists of first using relaxation
techniques and deep breathing to reduce your physical anxiety response like trembling.
Next you will get involved with creating list of scary situations creating anxiety and trying to overcome all these fears. For example, if you have a fear of flying, you will start looking pictures and videos of aeroplane to make you gain control over it. Next under the guidance of your therapist you will face real time situation and if at any point your anxiety rises in the process, you will shift to relaxation methods. After regaining control, you can switch to situation again.
Complementary therapy
Apart from therapies you can do exercises and meditations to achieve mental and emotional balance. Exercises are natural stress buster and regular exercise can help you a lot. Mindful meditations and progressive muscle relaxations are another way to keep you balanced.
Biofeedback is a method to collect your collect data about physiological functions such as breathing, heart rate and muscle tensions using sensors. It makes you aware of your body’s response towards anxiety and to make you control using relaxation techniques and other.
Hypnosis is way to use different therapeutic techniques in a state of deep relaxation and helps you to change your perception about anxiety and fear.
You need to adopt healthy lifestyle, doing regular exercises, relaxation, free from alcohol and drugs, avoid stimulants such as caffeine and nicotine etc.,
Social anxiety disorder (SAD)
We will discuss here social anxiety disorder (SAD) more prominently. It is supposed to run in family line or because of certain experiential behaviour. Sometimes it gets developed due to some embarrassing or unpleasant situation making a person overly socially anxious. Sometimes it is told to be due to brain structure. Temperament or having a feature of drawing attention like facial disfigurement also causes social anxiety disorder (SAD).
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) can be the cause of following personality feature in a person:
- Substance abuse
- Suicide or self-harm tendencies.
- Difficult social relationships
- Low employment achievements
- Low self esteem
- Negative self-talk
- Poor social skills
- Isolation
Treatment of Social anxiety disorder (SAD) involves medications, psychological therapies including psychoanalysis and psychodynamic.