Physical Sensations
Often anxious people are aware of their heart beating harder and faster. This is known as palpitations. Sweatiness and shaking can also occur. Sometimes people feel light-headed, dizzy and nausea as well as a range of other symptoms.
Thoughts
Very often worrying is a feature of anxiety particularly in generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). Here people often become concerned that the worrying will harm them. In panic attackspeople often believe that they may be at risk of fainting. Sometimes they interpret the palpitations as evidence of heart problems and again fret about the risk of ensuing harm or even death.
Behavioural Changes
With anxiety the person may be uneasy, jumpy and restless. They appear to be always on the lookout for possible danger in order to avoid such situations. In panic disorder the panic attacks may happen at any time. In some people, however, they happen only in certain situations such as when there are lots of people about. In this case a panic sufferer may simply avoid those situations and appear on the surface to have few problems in their lives. While in a panic attack, they may lie down, sit, or quickly remove themselves from the situation. Others use drugs or alcohol in the hope that this will help. Unfortunately, in the longer term they make anxiety worse.
Altered Emotions
In panic disorder the main emotion is fear. In less severe anxiety, people feel keyed up and irritable. Unfortunately, in generalised anxiety disorder when the symptoms last for much of an individual's day, people can feel desperate. Sometimes their mood can drop.
What causes anxiety?
There is no one cause of anxiety disorder. In some cases it appears to run in families. Sometimes it also starts after a big life change such as a bereavement, childbirth, or losing a job. A smaller number of cases are associated with physical or other psychological illnesses. These include headaches, insomnia, high blood pressure, lack of concentration or motivation.
Being anxious can also be a feature of phobias, which are fears of different situations such as types of animals or of crowds.
Lastly, some prescribed medications can make people feel anxious as a side effect, including some anti-depressants.
What are the consequences of anxiety?
Sufferers begin to avoid those things or places that they associate with their symptoms. This can get worse until it forms a significant part of the person's life. Fear of having a panic attack can be very disabling. Eventually it can prevent people from going about normal work or social activities and can lead to agoraphobia. Less commonly the distress and disablement caused by anxiety may cause periods of depression or drug and alcohol problems. It is therefore better to get treatment for anxiety problems rather than letting them continue.
More information
Although anxiety is related to fear, it is not the same. Fear is a direct, focused response to a specific event or object, and the person is consciously aware of it. Most people will feel fear if a person threatens them with a knife. They also will recognise that they are afraid.
Anxiety on the other hand is often unfocused, vague and hard to pin down to a specific cause. In this form it is called free-floating anxiety. Sometimes anxiety being experienced in the present may stem from an event or person that produced pain and fear in the past, but the individual is not consciously aware of the original source of the feeling.
It's aspect of remoteness makes it hard for people to compare their experiences of it. Whereas most people will be fearful in physically dangerous situations, and can agree that fear is an appropriate response in the presence of danger, anxiety is often triggered by objects or events that are unique and specific to an individual. An individual might be anxious because of a unique meaning or memory being stimulated by present circumstances, not because of some immediate danger. Another individual looking at the anxious person from the outside may be truly puzzled as to the reason for the person’s anxiety.
What are the symtoms?
Anxiety can be experienced in a number of different ways:
Psychological symptoms:
- Excess worry about life circumstances
- Feeling constantly on edge
- Difficulty in concentrating – Becoming forgetful
- Feelings of exhaustion and fatigue
- Feeling continuously panicky or tearful
Physical symptoms:
- Tension in muscles - Tension in the chest
- Over-breathing - Holding the breath - Shallow breathing
- Neck aches – Backaches
- Heart palpitations
- Shaking – Trembling – Dizziness
- Trouble sleeping
- Nausea
- Sweating – Cold clammy hands
- Irritability – Agitation
- Dread that something terrible is going to happen such as a blackout, seizure, heart attack