What is anxiety?
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Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which is often abbreviated to GAD
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Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is often abbreviated to OCD
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Panic Disorder, which includes a morbid fear of panicking
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Social Anxiety, which covers social inconfidence, shyness and all other social aspects
Anxiety is a natural emotion. It is an integral part of the human body’s defence mechanism, the fight of flight response. We need to have the potential to feel anxious in order to keep us safe from the threats we face, like speeding cars and bunches of youths hanging around on dark streets.
In the past anxiety from the flight or fight response was needed to keep us safe from the constant threat of the dangerous environment we inhabited. Now society is much safer and anxiety is often surplus to requirements.
How much is too much?
In some people anxiety comes at completely unnecessary moments and disrupts their lives, sometimes it is persistent. In these cases a person is said to have an anxiety disorder. There is no specific point where natural anxiety becomes an anxiety disorder, it is just a case of whether it is interfering with your life, wellbeing and happiness. If it is, you should start to speak to your doctor about it as well as looking for more information on this and other sites.
Types of Anxiety
The anxiety you feel when you have an anxiety disorder can be made up of various
mental and physical symptoms that present themselves for no apparent reason.
Some people have several symptoms, some may have only one, and some just have
an “odd feeling” that something is wrong. The mainstream medical
establishment has broken up anxiety disorders into various categories:
Don’t try to beat anxiety completely
Anxiety, as I stated earlier, is a natural phenomena in us all. You will not destroy your own ability to be anxious and it wouldn’t be desirable even if you could. What you are trying to achieve is to bring your anxiety levels down to the level everyone else lives with. This is quite definitely possible.
Some people claim to have a cure by which anxiety is banished completely instantly,
be vary wary of these outlandish claims, as more often than not getting over
anxiety is a process which takes a little time. Check out the speciifc disorders above, and the therapies to the right.
