Has Your Life Been Affected By Symptoms Of Anxiety?
Friday, September 25th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
We’ve all experienced symptoms of anxiety. Can you remember a time when you felt stressed or anxious? Perhaps it was during a first date or when you did something embarrassing in public. Anxiety is actually a natural response to experiences of fear or stress.
To clarify things. Experiencing occasional symptoms of anxiety does not mean that you suffer from an anxiety disorder. In anxiety disorder patients, experiences of anxiety are much more intense and frequent.
This isn’t to say that regular everyday anxiety can’t be linked to anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders can affect anyone because we all share the same vulnerability in our response to stress. Usually this is referred to as the fight or flight response, or simply the stress response.
The sensations and symptoms of anxiety that we feel during times of stress might sometimes make a situation worse. However at other times it can work positively. Moreover, anxiety affects us all a little differently. Depending on the individual, anxiety can be both a hindrance or a benefit.
For instance, say you’ve got your important driving theory test in two days. You want to pass, so you study hard. Another way of seeing this is that you ‘fear’ of failing. This anxiousness might push you harder to study. In this case the stress response has a positive effect.
On the flip side, imagine your 2nd practical driving test is coming up soon. You’re worried and anxious because you don’t want to fail once again. You imagine the embarrassment and disappointment if you were to fail. On the day you find that you’re jittery, anxious and on the verge of an anxiety panic attack. In this case the symptoms of anxiety really have a negative effect on your performance.
When the stress response is triggered it can help us against threats. When the response is triggered we experience changes in our body and mind, such as heightened awareness, increased adrenaline and more strength. Unfortunately your subconscious can not tell the difference between an emotional or physical threat.
People who suffer from anxiety disorders such as Social Phobia and Panic Disorder have a hypersensitive reaction to stress and fear. Most sufferers have negative associations with certain experiences which can lead to a panic attack.
Take a person who suffers from a phobia. That particular phobia might not seem like a threat to you or I but to the sufferer it’s a real threat. It’s actually normal to make negative associations with certain experiences. But in the case of a phobia sufferer, symptoms of anxiety are extreme and easily triggered.
Fortunately negative associations can be broken. By creating new positive beliefs we can recondition the mind to eliminate negative associations. By doing this we can not only control panic symptoms, we can control our fears.
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