Anxiety Disorders: How To Identify Them And Which Are The Most Common?
Do you know what an anxiety disorder is? Do you suffer from chronic anxiety? Discover how to identify an anxiety disorder and the most common types that exist.
Often invisible to others but anxiety disorders They seriously affect the physical and emotional well-being of the people who suffer from it. Occasional anxiety is normal, but anxiety is considered chronic when it is perceived by the person who suffers from it as excessive, that is, it is disproportionate in duration, intensity or frequency in relation to the real situation and when the symptoms persist for more than six months. Anxiety is not trivial because it strongly affects the quality of life of those who experience it.
Anxiety is a normal reaction in our body that occurs due to stress and can even be beneficial in some situations. Anxiety and the nervousness derived from it can alert us to dangers and help us pay better attention to them. The problem arises when anxiety symptoms prevail for a long time and symptoms appear. called anxiety disorders.
Currently, the anxiety disorders They are one of the most common mental problems and affect almost 30% of adults at some point in their lives. Even so, there are different types of anxiety disorders and all of them have an effective treatment to combat them.
When we suffer from anxiety What we experience is a negative anticipation of the future that generates both muscle tension and a behavior of avoidance, escape, or even leaving us paralyzed. In this way, anxiety disorders can cause people to avoid at all costs situations that trigger or worsen anxiety symptoms. Therefore, they are affected in their daily lives, at work and in personal relationships.
How to identify an anxiety disorder?
There are some attitudes that make it evident that there is a problem with anxiety. When most of these situations are repeated, it may mean that you are suffering from one of the types of anxiety disorders. In that case, it is circumstantial to be able to consult with a specialist psychologist to be able to alleviate the anxiety disorder.
1. Relative calm
People who suffer from anxiety disorder They seem to have a calm attitude. In this way, anxiety is perverse because it acts on both the mind and the body. The mind cannot find rest, constantly preoccupied with underlying distress, and causes pain in the body: shoulder pain, stomach pain, nausea, and many other symptoms. Anxiety seems impossible to stop. We are faced with a behavior of permanent analysis that leads us to paralysis.
Often, a anxiety disorder It is triggered by a new situation that destabilizes us, where we feel helpless, vulnerable, not up to the task…, and it can happen instantly and make us lose our resources. In these cases, those affected retreat and fear taking risks. We are facing escape behaviors.
3. Imposter syndrome
Even if we have a job we like, a balanced relationship and a rich social life, we always have the feeling that one day someone will expose us and realize that we have no business there, revealing our “hypothetical” incompetence to others. eyes of the world imposter syndrome causes anxiety permanent that leads people to think that they are of little value, that they happened there by chance, these people feel tremendous pressure to try to improve. In fact, this syndrome is usually linked to a lack of self-esteem or a poor self-concept.
4. Compulsive behavior
When anxiety is too strong, we often implement buffering behaviors or rituals to reduce it. For some, it will involve nail biting, hair tearing, or other things… Be careful, however, when these behaviors turn into obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), or addictions, it becomes necessary to consult a specialist. .
5. Always staying busy, an illusory solution
At anxious people They do not like to have moments of freedom, moments of boredom, because they know then that the anxiogenic thoughts will come to parasitize them and occupy the entire place. Knowing that they can even generate anxiety or panic attacks, it is understandable that we try to put them aside when activating them.
6. The omnipresence of anxiety
Even if external circumstances are favorable, the anxiety may still be present. Thoughts then parasitize our mind, or even disturbing images, and we feel the physical symptoms of anxiety: nausea, trembling, sweating,… If anxiety manifests itself for no apparent reason, it is a generalized anxiety disorder and it is advisable to consult a doctor. a therapist.
7. Perfectionism
Perfectionists often feel anxious because they get lost in the details and the imposed deadlines represent great anxiety for this type of people. They need a perfect job, even beyond what is asked of them, which requires a lot of time, energy, questions, indecision, which fuels their anguish.
8. Rumination or headache
The anxious people They are attentive to their less pleasant sensations and, therefore, result in a misinterpretation of their environment: Whether it is from the eyes of others, their gestures, their way of approaching them, they often make deductions that have no place. Anxious people are also specialists in reliving situations or conversations saying that they should have done better, or that they should have said this or that… It is necessary for these people to learn to get rid of this rumination because it generates frustration and even more stress.
We cannot tell ourselves that we will manage to live our lives without making mistakes, because error is human. The anxiety by performance keeps the individual in this fear of failure. It must be said that failure is a way of learning, that there is no failure in that learning.
“Success is not definitive, failure is not fatal: what counts is the courage to continue”
Winston Churchill
10. Inability to act
For some people, facing everyday issues such as making simple errands or making phone calls can cause high stress and they tend to propose action. When a person suffers from a anxiety disorder He usually avoids those situations that involve an effort to leave his comfort zone.
11. We are not what we seem to be
Others congratulate us on our life, our work, our family or constantly praise our qualities. But inside people with a anxiety disorder They are afraid that everything will fall apart overnight. Sometimes you think about leaving everything, so as not to face the possibility that one day everything will fall apart.
12. Guilt
When you suffer from a anxiety disorder, the affected person feels responsible for adverse external events that cannot be controlled. Although they are not controllable or exceed their capacity for action, guilt is an internal mechanism that people who suffer from anxiety use to improve, but it is very disabling.
Types of anxiety disorders
When we refer to anxiety disorders we are not talking about just one. The reality is that the worries and fears of our daily lives increasingly affect our emotional state, causing nerves, stress and anxiety.
The intensity with which we experience these situations can end up generating overwhelming feelings where everyday situations become a world that we do not know how to cope with. In this way, anxiety disorder has become one of the most common pathologies among people. Not everyone suffers the same symptoms or your anxiety is caused by the same causes. There are different types of anxiety disorders, here we will show you the most common ones so that you can identify them.
1. Generalized anxiety disorder
We relate the generalized anxiety with multiple topics such as work, family, couples, money or even what will happen in our future. It is a constant worry about something that we cannot control and it does not have to be important, but not being able to control it and not knowing what will happen creates anxiety and fear. We can even have insomnia and fatigue from worrying so much about not being able to anticipate what will happen in our lives.
2. Panic disorder
When the anxiety disorder It appears in different episodes suddenly and very intensely with high physiological activation, we are facing a panic attack. At that moment we feel fear, difficulty breathing and even rapid heartbeats, as if it were a heart attack, because we think that a catastrophe will occur. Having a panic attack does not mean having a panic disorder. A panic disorder is considered to exist when the person fears that a panic attack will occur. Panic attack disorder is actually the fear of having uncontrollable fear. It is possible that it is accompanied by agoraphobia, in fact those who suffer from it avoid places where they cannot escape if they notice the symptoms. It is very characteristic that they do not go where there are large crowds of people (cinemas, concerts, nightclubs, etc.), places where they cannot easily leave (subway, buses), and they tend to sit near places that are easy to evacuate.
This disorder It is characterized because the person who suffers from it has obsessive and intrusive thoughts or images where something horrible will happen. They are very unhealthy thoughts and that person can be aware and try to neutralize them to reduce that obsession, through rituals. Some examples of quite frequent rituals could be washing your hands repeatedly thinking that it has germs and could get sick with fatal results for them or the person around them, counting the times you turn off the light so as not to leave it on or even checking to see if the door at home is open. closed several times. The latter are verification rituals to increase the illusion of total security.
4. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
This type of anxiety disorder comes from exposure to death, serious injury, or violence. This situation may have been real or threatening. The experience does not have to be direct, it may have happened to others and they are witnesses. This exhibition does not refer to electronic media such as television, games, etc. The person who suffers from it avoids situations or thoughts that remind them of a traumatic event. They may suffer from total or partial amnesia, a negative view of the world and themselves, detachment, nightmares, intrusive images, alertness and reactivity.
5. Social phobia
We talk about social anxiety disorder when we are afraid of living an experience linked to social relationships due to insecurity, shame and even fear of not being accepted by friends or people who are in that circle. Thinking that you will judge us or we will feel left out and little integrated.
6. Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia occurs when we feel afraid of open spaces, making us vulnerable and causing anxiety attacks. For this reason, people who suffer from it usually confine themselves to their homes for fear of going out on the street. However, this anxiety disorder It also occurs in situations where we may feel trapped or helpless.
In addition to the six anxiety disorders mentioned above, being the most frequent, we must not forget that they are not the only ones, there are many more such as specific phobias, separation anxiety disorder or selective mutism.
It’s hard to live with anxiety in everyday life and it can take different forms, because it is like a monster
