subject: All About Anxiety Disorder [print this page] To prime our body to face the danger and overcome the challenging situation,anxiety is required. But excessive anxiety is harmful. When your body fails to switch off the body response mechanism even after the threat is over and gone, your anxiety persists and you feel the normal activities as challenging.
Having excess anxiety is a disorder called 'generalized anxiety disorder 'GAD' for short, wherein you perceive threat about normal everyday events such as locking your house to go out that triggers anxiety about burglary or fear of fire accident due to gas leak in the kitchen. These bouts of misplaced anxiety may last even for years and needs immediate medical attention.
People suffering from this disorder is found to have a family history of this ailment. This anxiety disorder generally affects people in the age group of 20-35. Anxiety is found to be the common denominator in all depression related ailments. It is found that those who suffer from this disorder have the habit of criticizing themselves harshly, triggering more anxiety.
The symptoms of this disorder may be confused with similar symptoms of other diseases such as thyroid or heart problem. The symptoms are headache,abnormal sweating,sleeplessness,loss of appetite,chest pains,irritability,trembling,dry mouth,lack of concentration.
Anxiety in extreme form triggers panic attacks which cause unshakable terror which is awful and you may feel that you are going to die. These attacks generally last up to 30 minutes which terrorize you to the core and leaves you shaken with fear.
It is better to strike at the root cause which triggers the disorder and confront it head on. Normally drugs and psychotherapy are combined to treat this disorder. There are many drugs for this disorder but they have side effects and may be habit forming.
This excess anxiety disorder can be cured by using psychotherapy. It is used to confront the fear that scares you. The psychotherapist interacts with you as a friend with a sympathetic ear. The therapist acts as someone you can talk to and you open up to the therapist to tell him what scares you and why. Suppose you have the fear of snakes chasing you,the therapist tries to make you understand the irrationality of your fear by convincing you that nature has not intended or programmed the snakes to chase anybody thereby pointing out the huge gap between your imagination and reality.
