Anxiety disorder is a mental health disorder characterized by feelings of worry, anxiety or fear that are strong enough to interfere with one’s daily activities. Anxiety makes it difficult to get through your day. Anxiety disorders include disorders that share features of excessive fear and anxiety and related behavioral disturbances. Fear is the emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat, whereas, anxiety is anticipation of future threat. Individuals with anxiety disorders typically overestimate the danger in situations they fear or avoid, the primary determination of whether the fear or anxiety is excessive or out of proportion is made by the clinician, taking cultural contextual factors in account.
Quality of life:
Any mental illness will always take a toll on people’s quality of life. Anxiety disorders also do the same as they essentially let us live in fear, dread and uncontrollable worry. Thus limits us in many ways, such as the inability to take risk in our personal life.
Anxiety can also negatively impact over your self-esteem, whether we experience panic disorder or a generalized anxiety disorder, leaving a life full of worries and self-doubt can negatively affect individual’s personality and self-worth.
Digestion problems are also a common effect of anxiety in many people. This manifests through nausea and stomach cramps. To a greater extent anxiety disorders may worsen irritable bowel syndrome. Chronic anxiety disorders also impair the immune system, increasing the risk of developing ulcers.
When the person suffer from anxiety, your body activates the sympathetic nervous system. This is a form of retaliation to the perceived threats, which in essence prompts the sympathetic nervous system to work tirelessly. Anxiety disorder also makes us prone to muscle tension, leading to headaches, joint pain and other neurological problems.
• With so many children and teens who have undiagnosed anxiety or depression, this can negatively impact their ability to learn and enjoy their time in their life particularly in academic region. Anxiety disorders cause people to feel frightened, distressed, or uneasy during situations in which most people would not feel that way. Left untreated, anxiety disorders can make it hard for students to get schoolwork done or study. It may affect their relationships with peers and teachers too. In some cases, students with anxiety disorders miss a lot of school days, or they may avoid school altogether
Children having generalized anxiety disorder have many worries and worry much of the time. They may also have physical symptoms like headaches, stomachaches, muscle tension or tiredness
In social anxiety, kids and teens with social phobias have an intense fear of being judged. It affects them in social or other situations. They will avoid situations where they may have to meet new people or perform.
Some kids have phobias which is the type of anxiety disorder like phobia of dogs, spiders or snakes. A child with a phobia will go to great lengths to avoid the thing they fear.
Some students are too fearful to talk at all in certain situations. Kids and teens with selective mutism are able to talk, and talk well. But they are too fearful to talk in some situations outside their home or with people other than friends.
• Anxiety disorders can seriously impact academic and occupational achievement. Research has found that people suffering from certain anxiety disorders fail to attain their educational goals, frequently dropping out of classes or school, avoiding not to pursue their desired degree. Additionally, anxiety disorders have been shown to predict longer periods of unemployment, less days to work, more disability days, lower average rates of pat, and reduced work productivity and achievement. It is common for people who experience anxiety to avoid the situations that make them feel anxious, but this only slows down someone’s ability to progress in their career.
• Anxiety can put a lot of strain on relationships and that can become very isolating. Friends and family may feel strained or stressed by your anxiety as well because they don’t want to see people suffer, but they don’t always know how to help. Anxiety can impact your relationships in a number of different ways depending on the symptoms that you are experiencing. For some, it might cause them to become overly dependent on their loved ones while others might isolate themselves for fear of embarrassment or becoming a burden.
Sometimes anxiety can cause a person to become overly dependent. Their anxiety might make them nervous to be alone or to face certain situations on their own. Anxiety can also cause a person to question every decision they make, which can also result in this overdependence. Thus overdependence can cause overthinking around social interactions, leading them to worry when someone doesn’t respond quickly via phone or social media.
People who are overly dependent on their relationships may struggle with effective communication and lash out in ways that are destructive to their relationships.
On the other hand, some people with anxiety disorders isolate themselves and become avoidant of relationships to avoid negative feelings like being disappointed by or frustrated with a friend or loved one.
• In Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) , having an excessive or persistent worry about multiple aspects of life for a prolonged periods of time. These worries can be related to finances, work stress, family, or any number of other things. Unfortunately, people might not always know the cause of worries, which can make this condition all the more frustrating.
More than 6.8 million people ( or 3.1% of the U.S population) are affected by GAD each year, and women are twice as likely to be impacted by this illness, while there isn’t an exact cause of GAD, there are several factors that can attribute their life, including;
Family history of anxiety,
Prolonged or recent exposure to stressful situations,
Excessive caffeine or tobacco use and,
Traumatic childhood events.
In Anxiety disorder, complex phobias such as Agoraphobia and social phobia (social anxiety disorder) can often have a detrimental effect on a person’s everyday life and mental wellbeing. Agoraphobia often involves a combination of several interlinked phobias. For example, someone with a fear of going outside or leaving their home may also have a fear of being left alone (monophobia) or of places where they feel trapped (claustrophobia).
If the person has social phobia, the thought of being seen in public or at social events can make them feel frightened, anxious and vulnerable. Intentionally, people in daily life avoid by meeting people in social situations is a sign of social phobia. In extreme cases of social phobia, as with agoraphobia, some people are too afraid to leave their home. People with phobias can also have panic attacks and these can be very frightening and distressing. The symptoms in people often occur suddenly and without warning.
Treatments:
An anxiety disorder is like any other health problem that requires treatment. Medicines can’t cure an anxiety disorder but they can improve the symptoms and help people to function better, such as;
Anti-anxiety medications like benzodiazepines.
Antidepressants: It tweak how our brain uses certain chemicals to improve mood and reduce stress.
Beta-blockers: can relieve rapid heartbeat, shaking and trembling that is reduces anxiety.
Psychotherapy or counselling also helps to deal with anxiety or anxiety disorder. They applied certain approaches, some of which are:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), the most common type of therapy used with anxiety disorders. CBT for anxiety teaches to recognize thought patterns and behaviors that lead to troublesome feelings.
