Anxiety

Anxiety is by far the most prevalent mental health crisis faced by people in our modern world. More than 40 million American adults struggle with anxiety of some sort. Anxiety never exists in a vacuum, it’s always accompanied by worry and emotional pain. It amplifies our fears and the worry and pain hijack our senses and prevent us from enjoying the present moment.

Most Common Signs and Symptoms

• Shortness of breath
• Heart palpitation
• Chest pain
• Sweating
• Trembling or shaking
• Ruminating or obsessive thoughts
• Muscle tension
• Fatigue or weakness

Types of Anxiety include:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder (chronic stress)
  High frequency and high-intensity anxiety, exaggerated worry and tension. Generalized anxiety disorder consists of realistic but excessive worry about everyday things like work, family, health money or school. The worry is out of proportion to the stressor, causing you to feel regularly on edge.


• Panic Attacks (Panic Disorder)
  Acute episodes of intense panic and fear. A panic attack is an intense, sudden episode of anxiety and fear that often includes heart palpitation. A panic disorder is defined by repeated panic attacks.


• Social Anxiety
  Emotional discomfort in group settings, often accompanied by the fear of being embarrassed or judged by others.


• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  Results from experiencing a traumatic or life-threatening event. Symptoms include flashbacks or nightmares about the traumatic event, overactive startle response, hypervigilance and avoiding people or situations that might remind you of the event.


• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
  Uncontrollable intrusive thoughts that are alleviated by some behavior. The thoughts are the obsessions and the behaviors are the compulsions. The compulsion is meant to reduce the anxiety caused by obsessive thoughts.


• Phobias
  Unrealistic and exaggerated fears of specific things, places or people. Phobic individuals usually know how unrealistic their fears are but cannot help their reactions.

Cycle of Avoidance

Because we want to avoid suffering we actively try to escape anxious feelings as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, we only rarely succeed at truly getting rid of those anxious feelings. Suppressing them, denying them or distracting ourselves only works momentarily as an escape from anxiety. They’re temporary fixes at best. Anxiety inevitably returns, often with even greater intensity. We refer to this dynamic as the “cycle of avoidance.” We cannot fix the problem of anxiety by avoiding it; we must instead learn how to change our relationship with it.