Reduce Your Anxiety!The Cause and Effects of Anxiety |
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What is Anxiety?Anxiety is an emotional state which combines unpleasant thoughts and feelings of fear or worry with bodily changes such as tension and changes in blood flow. Anxiety states take many forms; they have many causes; they vary in both intensity and duration; and the exact combination of emotional and physical symptoms involved varies from person to person. To simplify, we have divided them into separate categories. NERVOUSNESS AND SOCIAL, SEXUAL, LIFE AND WORK ANXIETIESThese are short-term anxiety states which we all experience from time to time. For example, we tend to use the word nervousness to refer to the moderate amount of anxiety which we feel in situations where failure or poor performance could have personally unpleasant consequences. Examples of this include the nervousness of an actor before his performance, a public speaker before he delivers his address and a sportsman before he plays his match. The mental and physical arousal associated with such events may actually help to improve one's performance. But many people find that they are over-aroused in particular social, sexual, life or work situations. If you are one of these people, you will not need to be told that this excessive nervousness or social anxiety is completely unhelpful. First of all, it reduces your ability to think clearly and to concentrate, instead filling your mind with confused and worried thoughts. Then, as it increases in intensity, it begins to affect your body. Your palms may sweat, your heart may pound, your stomach may churn, your mouth go dry, your face burn with embarrassment, and you may need to empty bowel or bladder. Although you may know you really have nothing to fear, your emotions seem to overpower your reason. No matter how important it is for you to speak confidently, express yourself clearly, or demonstrate your ability, your confidence and ability are undermined by your anxiety. Small wonder, then, that the victim of anxiety often feels ridiculous. FEARS AND PHOBIASPerhaps, strictly speaking, the word fear should only be used to describe the very intense emotional response which we sometimes feel in objectively dangerous or frightening situations. (For example, when people in a burning building become paralyzed in terror, we know that their main emotion is fear.) However, fear has come to imply a much wider range of feelings of anxiety and worry. To take but one example, you might say of a shy person: 'He has a fear of meeting people.' Fear sometimes develops when there is no rational explanation for it. If a person says that he or she is afraid of dogs or cats, flying or high places, enclosed or open spaces, he may well have a phobia. This is an irrational (but real) fear of an object, event, place or situation. Phobic fear, or more correctly phobic anxiety, is the emotional response of a phobic person to the object of his phobia. PERSISTENT ANXIETY AND ANXIETY ATTACKSSo far we have considered what are obviously short-term anxiety states. But sometimes a person feels anxious or 'nervous' for much - or even all - of the time. He may have a tense posture, strained facial expression, jerky movements; he may complain of pains in his body or headaches; he may have an upset stomach and perspiring hands; he feels nervous and his hands may tremble; and he often claims a feeling of danger or impending catastrophe, although he does not know what he fears. Even at moderate levels of anxiety, rational thoughts may be replaced by irrational worries, or a person may become constantly apprehensive with a vague feeling of threat hanging over him. This condition is called 'free floating anxiety', but we like the term persistent anxiety to emphasize the contrast with anxiety felt in specific situations. It is explained later. Occasionally, people experience a short-lived but intense anxiety attack. Sometimes these attacks occur 'out of the blue', but more often they occur in a person who is fairly anxious anyway. They represent an exaggerated response by the nervous system to mild stimuli. Sometimes the response is so extreme that no more than a disturbing thought causes marked feelings of anxiety, and in the worst cases a stimulus so insignificant that it cannot even be identified causes a major attack of panic. This can be very alarming, because all the symptoms of anxiety listed above may occur at once and reduce the person concerned to total confusion. These attacks play a major part in agoraphobia. WHAT IS ANXIETY? WORRIED THINKINGPerhaps the basis of all anxiety is worried thinking. People frequently worry about strange things when they are suffering from anxiety. Before we go on to discuss each of these anxiety-related problems in more detail, we need to outline some points which are relevant to all forms of anxiety. These include the effects of anxiety, and the different ways in which anxiety can develop. THE EFFECTS OF ANXIETY
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