Anxiety disorder is a violation of mental harmony, which, unlike the relatively mild short-term anxiety caused by a stressful situation, lasts at least 6 months, filling a person's life with fear and uncertainty.
Consolidated over time, anxiety becomes a stable formation and turns into a personality property - anxiety, which is the most important component of chronic distress and indicates the insufficiency of a person's functional reserves to overcome life's problems. Increased personal anxiety is closely related to intrapersonal conflicts, neuroticism and depression, as well as to psychosomatic pathology.
Excessive anxiety, according to the prominent psychotherapist Karen Horney, is the basic feeling underlying all neuroses, and according to Irvin Yalom, "fear and anxiety, which are indispensable companions of psychotrauma, have a destructive effect on the psyche."
Anxiety disorders include:
– panic state: characterized by a sudden attack of terror, usually accompanied by palpitations, sweating, weakness, loss of consciousness or dizziness, a feeling of hot flashes or chills; the person has trembling or numb hands, nausea, chest pain, or a feeling of suffocation.
– obsessive-compulsive disorder (obsessive-compulsive disorder): the patient experiences persistent unpleasant (obsessive, obsessive) thoughts and uses rituals (compulsive actions) to control the anxiety caused by these same thoughts. For example, if a person is obsessed with the fear of infections, he develops a compulsion to wash his hands all the time.
– post-traumatic stress (PTSD): occurs as a result of a severe stressful event associated with physical harm or violence. A person suffering from PTSD relives his trauma again and again, and it manifests itself in thoughts during the day, and in nightmares at night. He becomes emotionally insensitive, tough, irritable, more aggressive, loses interest in what used to please him.
– social phobia (or social anxiety disorder): the person becomes overly anxious and too shy (shy) in everyday interpersonal situations, experiences a constant strong fear that they are looked at and judged, fear of being in an uncomfortable position. He freaks out on the eve of events and during them, manifesting this on a bodily level in the form of reddening of the skin, heavy sweating, trembling, nausea and difficulty during conversations. Then he spends hours worrying about what will be said about him after the events are over.
– specific phobias: a strong and irrational fear of something that does not actually pose a great danger, for example - fear of closed spaces, heights, escalators, tunnels, water, flying, etc.
- general anxiety syndrome: such a patient experiences constant excessive excitement and tension, even if there is no real reason for it or they are insignificant, and is not able to get rid of his worries, although in most cases he understands that his anxiety is much stronger than the situation requires. The person is in anticipation of a catastrophe, unnecessarily preoccupied with health, money, family problems or difficulties at work. This is reflected in bodily symptoms such as weakness, headaches, muscle tension or pain, shortness of breath, hot flashes, difficulty swallowing, trembling, sweating, nausea, dizziness, etc.
The state of anxiety becomes the leading pathogenetic factor in psychosomatic pathology and, as a rule, leads to depression.
Oncopsychologists have found that anxiety is especially high in women who are subsequently diagnosed with breast cancer. In another study, psychiatrists from the University of Bergen examined more than 62,000 people in Norway's largest public health survey. They revealed a statistically significant relationship between a high degree of anxiety, identified in some of the examined ten years ago, and the subsequent development of precancerous conditions.
Treatment of high anxiety (most often in combination with neurosis and depression) at the EXPIO center is a reasonable choice for those who want to avoid life-threatening diseases in the future!