By Amy Langdown
Anxiety - A synonym for nerves or a serious mental health disorder? Here's a summary on why it's the latter.
When you google synonyms for nervous, anxious comes up. As a result, anxiety and nervousness are often seen as the same thing. However, to those of us who actually live with an anxiety disorder, those two words are entirely different in meaning. Nervous is the butterfly feeling you have before a test or a performance, but anxiety is often without a specific cause. People with anxiety sometimes feel anxious all of the time. Nerves may come and go and the reason behind your nerves is clear. However, anxiety disorders can be a more lurking feeling - always there and sometimes amplified.
The main difference between the two is that nerves are set off by an event, while people with anxiety don’t need a specific trigger to be anxious. One morning, an anxious person might wake up feeling anxious for no particular reason and stay feeling that way for the rest of the day. There are many psychological and physical symptoms that have been proven to be caused by anxiety disorders:
Psychological Symptoms:
Excessive worry
Panic attacks
Derealisation (feeling detached from surroundings)
Depersonalisation (feeling detached from yourself)
Hypochondria
Repetitive or looping thoughts
Obsessive thoughts
Inability to relax
Difficulty completing tasks
Overactive imagination
Fear of embarrassment
Dwelling on thoughts
Depressive thoughts
Constantly feeling tired
Dampened sense of humour
Inability to focus
Thoughts of isolation
Physical Symptoms
Big increase/decrease in appetite
Heart palpitations
Lightheadedness
Exhaustion
Headaches
Chest pains or aches
Pacing
Nausea
Excessive sweating
Tinnitus (ringing ears)
Stomach cramps
Rib pains
Pains in back, shoulders and neck
Ache behind eyes
Bloating
These symptoms are just some of the things a person with anxiety can experience- intermittently or every day. Of course, these symptoms aren't always signals of anxiety; many of them can be cause by other things.
Some symptoms are more linked to specific anxiety disorders.There are three main types of anxiety disorder (although of course there are more specific types also) : Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD, Social anxiety and General anxiety Disorder. A person with OCD may feel the need to mediate their worry with certain habits. A person with General anxiety on the other hand, may feel nauseous a lot of the time and have a constant shoulder or neck pain due to being tense.
OCD is usually a feeling for need of control over specific things which mean the individual may have an obsession and develop rituals in order to satisfy that need for control. Social anxiety is usually characterised by what you might call ‘excessive shyness’. However, it can be a lot more than that. People with social anxiety may constantly worry what others think about what the say or do or look like, and that can control their future actions. Often for those with social anxiety, their main fear is that they can never know what others are thinking and therefore cannot control it; so they do all they can to make everyone like them and everything they do, which is of course, impossible. People with social anxiety know that this is impossible, thus leading to further anxiety.
General anxiety disorder is hard to condense into a simple explanation. Essentially, general anxiety is unique to each individual and is there in general, meaning most of the time. Those with general anxiety might be anxious when in exam situations or around conflict. Some people with general anxiety may struggle to go into busy places because of the amount of people or to school/work.
Anxiety can be a very dangerous thing, as sufferers can think that they’re feeling that way for no reason and they begin to question everything about themselves and how they act and feel which quite often causes a person to isolate themselves from those they trust. This can very quickly lead a person to depressive thoughts and full depressive episodes due to the feeling of hopelessness with their anxious feelings and thoughts.
Anxiety is a disorder that affects approximately 3 million people in Britain alone. It isn’t just an adjective or a synonym for nervous. It is a very real, very powerful mental health disorder that needs to be taken more seriously. If you have concerns about anxiety, see your doctor.
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