subject: From Mchenry, Huntley, Cary, And Algonquin, Il-understanding Your Feelings Of Anxiety And Depression [print this page] Anxiety typically consists of emotions, which are laden with worry, trepidation and hypervigilance. Symptoms include tenseness, ruminating over certain thoughts, heart palpitations, stomach fluttering etc. and nervousness most often localized to the chest.
Anxiety is multifaceted and consists of both somatic issues (body) and cognitive (thinking processes)ones. Anxiety is regarded as a mechanism of fight or flight and was originally engineered in us to protect us from harm.
Since anxiety prepares one to fight danger, typical physical symptoms required to do that appear i.e. the heart may start to palpitate and beat faster and blood pressure often rises. Since anxiety is preparing us to fight a menace of sorts, our nervous system starts generating a surge of blood going out to the muscles enabling our body to escape or fight as may be necessary.
There is also decreased functioning in your digestive system because blood is diverted from your abdominal area to your musculoskeletal area. Again, anxiety has been engineered into us as a survival mechanism, intended to enhance the odds of our survival.
People suffering from abnormal anxiety usually have a built-in neurological predisposition to worry or fear that something catastrophically harmful or dangerous might happen based on some triggering situation. Anxiety is heavily driven in the brain by two structures: The hippocampus and the amygdala.
These structures trigger when the body feels in need of safety because of an irrational perception of a lurking threat or due to the irrational anticipation that something hurtful or dangerous might happen imminently.
As mentioned previously, anxiety is a defense mechanism which is hard-wired into us with the purpose of protecting us from the plethora of real or imagined dangers in our environment. However, because of genetic errors or unfortunate types of genetic or trait pooling throughout the generations, some of us develop abnormal forms of anxiety when it is triggered even though there is no realistic danger with which to contend.
So, instead of protecting us from trouble, it actually causes it and for no rational reason. This is referred to as an anxiety disorder.
Occasionally, anxiety exists simultaneously with depression or bipolar disorder. Anxiety dysfunctions are divided into several types, including, specific phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.
A phobia is a targeted fear of a particular thing, person or situation, such as a fear of snakes or public speaking. Phobic fears by their nature are irrational because the perceived or anticipated harm that is imagined as a consequence of engaging in the feared behavior is irrational and not likely to happen.
These conditions are fueled by extensive, catastrophic and irrational imagination that has gone terribly awry because the fears are catastrophic and not valid. Because of this catastrophic way of imagining consequences, some individuals may experience compelling frightening panic attacks and may have problems breathing, feeling dizzy and fearing they're going crazy.
Generalized anxiety disorders are much more common in the population and refer to a free floating anxiety, tension or foreboding which seems to taint most things in a person's daily life; there is no specific stimulus. On the other hand, obsessive compulsive disorder is a very bizarre type of anxiety that gives sufferers the idea that something is just wrong with their mind.
In this condition,individuals have obsessive thoughts that point to some dangerous consequence if a certain behavior, like checking the lock on the car is not done repetitively and compulsively. The imagined consequence, again is irrational but sufferers need to compulsively repeat the 'ritual' to relieve their anxiety of the feared consequence.
Washing their hands repetitively for no rational reason is another ritual that some patients feel compelled to do. Psychotherapy, counseling and some psychiatric medications can be helpful in reducing the intensity and frequency of the obsessions that lead to the compulsions.
