What is Anxiety :
In the daily life of all people and events happen are circumstances that can make a person feel nervous, pressured or even threatened. Given these incentives, considered “stressful”, the individual must react by a proportionate response and adapt to new circumstances. When the person is not able to react proportionately and stress exceeds its adaptability, the reaction appears anxious.
Anxiety is a disorder that occurs with high frequency in modern society and everyday items appears when exceeding the adaptive capacity.
Appearing, usually manifests as a disproportionate response to threats or incidents “stress” of everyday life. The patient often feels permanently threatened, so their physiological system remains on alert for a long time, as if his life was in danger because of a threat and it does not cease. Thus, the person with anxiety symptoms manifest themselves Threat response in a chronic and disproportionate, to stimuli that are not threatening.
How does it occur ?
Several theories attempt to explain chronic anxiety, and probably all of them containing a part of reality:
- Anxiety can be caused by a conflict between what is desired and what conscience dictates is best, at the contradiction of the wishes and convictions appears an anxiety reaction;
- Anxiety is a learned response: when a person reacts to a given stimulus anxious, with high probability eagerly react to the stimulus repetition.
Anxiety Symptoms
In response to threats vital physiological response triggers biochemical reactions that prepare the body for a reaction of attack-defense or escape from the imminent threat. In the reaction of anxiety, these same mechanisms are put in place so disproportionate to a threat that is not this or that is much less intense or dangerous.
Anxiety has two types of signs and symptoms:
Physical signs and symptoms:
- We present the physiological signs and symptoms of an attack-flight reaction: tachycardia, sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, muscle tension.
- Panic Attacks: Sometimes, the patient may feel chest pain that can be confused with angina pain, or feel subjective sensation of breathlessness and hyperventilate, causing the symptoms of hyperventilation box, sometimes, the patient reported having feelings of unreality.
Psychological symptoms:
- Obsessions: recurrent thoughts about the stress, permanent and recurrent thoughts about serious or imminent danger,
- Chronic state of alert to possible dangers,
- Lack of attention to stimuli that previously interested him,
- Difficulty concentrating on other issues different from those dangers.
Anxiety Diagnosis
The box has anxiety primarily clinical diagnosis, through the interview and evaluation of symptoms presented by the patient. Complementary examinations are not usually reveal any additional information to the patient externalizing symptoms, and may show typical signs of anxiety box. However, some medical conditions can manifest some symptoms similar to anxiety states, and may need to discard them as the source of the disorder.
Anxiety disorders can manifest in many different ways, with the most frequent:
- Acute stress disorder: to stressful stimuli, the patient can trigger an overreaction promptly.
- Anxiety disorder medical condition: if a real or hypothetical severe disease, the patient may react in a overly anxious, has an excessive fear of a specific disease (cancerophobia).
- Induced Anxiety Disorder substances: the anxiety attack happens as undesirable effect of a particular drug or substance.
- Unspecified anxiety disorder: anxiety reaction has no specific origin or known.
- Panic disorder with or without agoraphobia: presents repeated and unpredictable crises of anxiety, the patient is feeling unwarranted fear and presents the typical physical symptoms of anxiety attacks.
- Specific phobias: the patient triggers an anxiety reaction to certain stimuli such as objects, people, animals or situations.
- Agoraphobia without panic disorder: in it, the patient has to stay in fear public places.
- Social phobia: the patient has panic attacks to certain social situations.
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder: the patient has fears and obsessions of intensity that come to interfere with normal life: the patient should do or check again and again that which obsesses compulsively (washing hands, checking that doors or the taps are closed, fasten the clothes, etc.), so often unable to perform their normal duties because of their compulsive behaviors (not sleep, late for work, can not leave the house, etc..).
- Generalized anxiety disorder: patients have fear and concern over an indefinitely, have excessive and unrealistic fears in all situations of normal life, without focusing fears of any particular stimulus.
- PTSD: after a really traumatic event that has endangered the patient’s life or that he has produced in a reaction of great anxiety, the patient can go back to mentally relive the event or experience through images or stimuli associated with the initial trauma, causing anxiety reactions to stimuli that remind the patient to make the initial event.
Anxiety Treatment
Treatment of chronic anxiety must be addressed mainly from two aspects:
- Psychotherapy or psychological approach: the patient usually improves upon speaking of their concerns in a free to a person with a medical or psychotherapeutic. They are also effective relaxation techniques, behavioral therapy and other types of psychotherapy or psychiatric approach.
- Pharmacotherapy: through drugs which reduce anxiety or excessive response to improve the balance of cerebral neurotransmitters. The pharmacological approach can be very effective, but in many cases it may not be necessary when dealing with mild cases.
Precautions
Any action or activity that may result in an increase in self-confidence of the person or to help tackle everyday problems with greater confidence will be an effective measure to prevent the appearance of a picture of anxiety.
Thus, it can be a big help the physical exercise, adequate sleep, maintaining a proper diet and avoidance of stimulants, like having adequate preparation to meet the professional challenges of daily life and to resolve conflicts without tensions or respond to everyday problems with determination, integrity and objectivity.
