What is Anxiety Disorder?
Anxiety is often a healthy feeling as it gives you the adrenaline rush to do better. However, when a person feels stress at misappropriating levels regularly, it might become an anxiety disorder. One may be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder if their anxiety leads to excessive fear, nervousness, worry, and apprehension. Anxiety disorders alter the way individuals behave and emotions, causing physical symptoms. Mild anxiety might be unsettling and vague, while severe anxiety may severely affect regular life. These disorders affect around 40 million people in the United States, making these conditions the most widespread group of mental illnesses.
What are the Six Types of Anxiety Disorders?
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
GAD is a chronic disorder involving excessive, prolonged anxiety and unnecessary (or actual) worries about nonspecific life events, situations, or objects. It is the most common and known anxiety disorder, and people with this condition cannot always find the cause behind their anxiety. People suffering from generalized anxiety disorder worry even if they have nothing to fear. Commonly, they report feelings that something terrible may happen, or they can’t calm themselves down. Excessive and unrealistic worry can be frightening and interfere with your daily activities and relationships.
Panic Disorder
Brief or extreme attacks of intense terror and apprehension come under panic disorders. These sudden attacks lead to confusion, shakiness, nausea, dizziness, and breathing difficulties. Panic attacks occur fast and escalate rapidly, reaching an alarming peak after 10 minutes, and can persist for hours. Panic attacks usually strike after long-duration stress or frightening experiences but may also get you without a trigger. The person having a panic attack might misinterpret the situation as a life-threatening illness and make drastic changes in behavior to reduce the risk of any future attacks.
Social Anxiety Disorder (or Social Phobia)
Social phobia is an extreme fear of negative judgment from people in social situations or public embarrassment. This type of anxiety disorder includes a range of feelings, including stage fright, anxiety around humiliation and rejection, and a fear of intimacy. Social anxiety disorder can make you avoid pubic gatherings and human contact, making everyday living a troublesome task.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
PTSD is a traumatic mental health condition triggered by a terrifying event that stays in an individual’s mind, either witnessing it or experiencing it. The symptoms may include nightmares, flashbacks, severe anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about several events.
Selective Mutism
It is a form of anxiety that affects some children. Even after having excellent communication skills around family or familiar people, they cannot speak in specific places or contexts, such as school. It can be an extremely high form of social phobia.
Separation Anxiety Disorder
High anxiety levels after separation from an individual or place that offers feelings of safety or security characterize separation anxiety disorder. Panic symptoms may also occur due to the break from loved ones.
Specific Phobias
There are some irrational fears a person may have, which lead to avoiding a specific object or situation. Phobias are not like any other anxiety disorder related to some particular cause. A person with a phobia may acknowledge extreme illogical fear but remain unable to control the feelings of anxiety around the trigger. Phobia triggers range from situations, places, and animals to everyday objects.
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is a fear and avoidance of events, places, or situations that an individual may find difficult to escape. In this condition, a person would feel that help would not be available if they become trapped. People often misunderstand this medical condition as a phobia of open spaces and going outdoors, but it is not simple. A person with this mental health condition may fear leaving home or their comfort zone, using elevators and public transport.
How to Know if You Have Anxiety?
With several diagnosis measures available, excessive fear or worry came out as the main symptoms of anxiety. The medical conditions associated with stress can make it hard for you to breathe, stay still, sleep, and concentrate. If you have the following symptoms, you have any one of the anxiety disorders:
● Feelings of panic, fear, doom, uneasiness, or danger
● Sleep problems, inability to stay calm and still
● Shortness of breath or
