The New Oxford American Dictionary defines anxiety as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.”
Everybody feels tense and nervous sometimes. It’s a normal part of life, and for kids, it’s a normal part of growing up. Think about the young children you know. They’re probably afraid of thunder, dogs, clowns or maybe even Santa Claus. As they get older, most of them will outgrow these and many other fears.
Teenagers and adults feel afraid or worried as part of typical things that come up in life, at least sometimes. If you think about it, there are times when being worried or afraid actually helps you. For example, if you are crossing the street and a car is coming fast, feeling afraid makes your body move out of the way, and that’s a good thing! Similarly, worrying about a big test might make you study harder.
Some people feel more worried or afraid than others. There’s a wide range of what’s considered “normal” when it comes to anxiety. As long as you can do what you need to do, the anxiety you feel doing it is probably normal.
For some people, however, the amount of worry or fear they have gets in the way of everyday life. It’s one thing to worry about sounding silly talking on the phone, for example, and another if you actually can’t make yourself do it. If school is something that makes you anxious, you might have trouble making yourself go. The idea of going might make you so sick you have to stay home, or you might feel so awful while you’re there that you can’t get anything done.
For some people, the problem is not so much fear of a thing or a situation as it is worry about the future. You might find yourself thinking of horrible things that could happen to you or your family. You might not want to go out of your house because you don’t feel safe. That much worry gets in the way of having a normal life.
If worry or fear interferes with the things you want or need to do in life, you may have an anxiety disorder. The bad news is, feeling so anxious just doesn’t feel very good. The good news is, there are medications and relaxation techniques that can help you manage your anxiety, and treatments that could make your anxiety disorder much less of a problem, or make it go away altogether.
There are a lot of different kinds of anxiety disorders and a lot of different causes. For most people, there are a combination of biological factors and environmental factors that first cause their disorders. This means that you may have inherited a higher risk for anxiety disorders. Then, as you lived your life, something (or several things) may have happened that flipped the anxiety switch in your brain to “on.”
We know that some people are born more likely to have anxiety disorders. These people may have other relatives with the disorders, or something may have happened during their birth mother’s pregnancy that changed the chemicals and hormones their brains were exposed to before they were born. Usually, there’s no real way to know.
Sometimes a particular event or situation obviously starts an anxiety disorder. Traumatic events, which are those that are very sudden, very scary and make you feel very helpless or horrified, can leave you feeling vulnerable and scared. If your brain is the right sort, this can be the beginning of a problem with anxiety. If the trauma had to do with a particular person, place or thing, you might develop a particular fear of that person, place or thing and anything that reminds you of it.
More often, there isn’t one thing that seems to trigger the first bits of anxiety. Regardless of what caused your anxiety, there’s no point in blaming anyone or feeling guilty about it. Whatever caused it is over, and you’re left with a brain that’s primed to be anxious. It’s time to learn to manage it and help you feel better!
There are five major types of anxiety disorders recognized by the mental health community.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder causes worry and anxiety about things that do not provoke anxiety in typical people, or anxiety that is greater than most people would have about given situations or issues. This worry is not limited to one area of life and is not a fear of a specific thing.
Social Anxiety Disorder causes anxiousness about situations where you need to interact with other people. This could include parties, business meetings, public speaking or even just answering the phone. This anxiety is significantly greater than most people have about these situations, and is limited to social situations rather than a broad range of life situations.
Panic Disorder causes people to have periods of time where they experience intense fear. Their heart beats faster, they sweat, and many people report they think they are going to die (even though they’re not). A variant of this called Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia occurs when people are afraid to go out in public because they fear they will have a panic attack and either embarrass themselves or be unable to get help.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a term that people throw around all the time, but real OCD is serious business. OCD causes people to have repetitive thoughts and worries that they cannot get out of their head, and to compulsively do ritualistic and repetitive things either to cope with perceived dangers or ward off bad consequences. One common form involves an obsessive fear of germs and repeatedly washing hands, but OCD can cause any number of other worries and rituals.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can occur when someone experiences or witnesses an event that threatens their life or safety, such as a natural disaster, violent crime or accident. Following this, virtually everyone experiences problems like replaying the event in their mind, startling easily or having trouble sleeping. Typically, these go away within the first month after the incident. For some people, however, these symptoms do not resolve on their own. People with PTSD have symptoms of hyperarousal, such as being easily angered, trouble sleeping or being constantly on guard. They also have intrusive memories of the event, which can take the form of dreams, flashbacks, or a sudden sensation that the event is happening again even when they know it is not. Finally, people with PTSD go to great lengths to avoid anything that could remind them of the event, to the point where some people have difficulty experiencing emotions at all.