Comprehensive guide on managing anxiety: Addressing the top six quandaries about worry, addressed by a clinical psychologist
Understanding Anxiety: Causes, Symptoms, and Long-term Effects
Anxiety, an emotional state of nervous apprehension, often involves negative and worrisome thoughts and physical jitters. It can be a helpful response in appropriate situations, but when it becomes excessive or persistent, it can lead to significant problems.
Causes of Anxiety
The causes of anxiety are complex and multifaceted. They can be traced back to genetic predispositions, environmental stressors, and brain mechanisms related to fear processing. For instance, excessive or unresolved stress can trigger anxiety by affecting brain regions like the amyggdala, which process threat signals. A family history of anxiety and certain personality traits, such as neuroticism, can also increase vulnerability to developing anxiety disorders.
Symptoms of Anxiety
Anxiety manifests both mentally and physically. Mentally, symptoms may include excessive worry, fear of abandonment (attachment-related anxiety), and heightened emotional responses such as irritability or anger. Physically, anxiety activates the body's fight-or-flight response, causing symptoms like chest pain, rapid heartbeat, and muscle tension.
Long-term Effects
If left untreated, anxiety can have severe long-term effects. These can include worsening anxiety symptoms, depression, interpersonal conflicts, and controlling or confrontational behavior within relationships. Physiologically, chronic anxiety and stress may increase cortisol levels, which negatively impact the immune system and cardiovascular health, thereby increasing morbidity and mortality risk among people with heart disease or other health conditions.
The Dynamic Interplay
The causes, symptoms, and long-term effects of anxiety are closely interconnected, influencing each other throughout the course of the disorder. For example, persistent anxiety can lead to a cycle of avoidance, which in turn perpetuates the anxiety.
Managing Anxiety
Effective management often requires addressing all three aspects: mitigating causes (stress reduction), treating symptoms (therapy, medication), and preventing or managing long-term impacts. It's important to remember that anxiety, in moderation, can be helpful. However, unhealthy anxiety can be thought of as a false alarm, priming the body in a way that's out of proportion to the situation.
Types of Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety can take various forms, including phobias like agoraphobia, generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) were once considered forms of anxiety disorder but are now treated as their own categories.
Avoidance as a Strategy
Avoidance can be a tempting strategy, but it's counterproductive in the long run. Unhelpful coping strategies, such as getting drunk to calm nerves, can exacerbate the problem rather than solve it.
People who score highly on the personality trait of neuroticism tend to experience frequent ups and downs in mood, negative emotions, and worry a lot, making them especially prone to severe anxiety. On the other hand, people who are more trusting and extroverted tend to be less prone to anxiety, especially in a social context.
Chronic anxiety can make the physical sensations associated with anxiety especially troubling. A bout of anxiety often starts with negative thoughts about an upcoming situation. If this anxiety leads to a cycle of avoidance, it can become problematic and may warrant professional intervention.
- The future of health-and-wellness may involve developing more effective strategies for managing anxiety, taking into account its complexity and the dynamic interplay between its causes, symptoms, and long-term effects.
- Science has identified mental-health issues such as anxiety as having a connection with brain mechanisms related to fear processing and environmental stressors, opening up potential avenues for future research in science related to health.
- To ensure optimal mental and physical health, it is crucial to address anxiety in the long-term, preventing or managing its impacts on our emotional wellbeing, relationships, and overall health, including cardiovascular health and immune system.
