What is Anxiety?

Question

What is anxiety - symptoms pls?

Answer 1

Anxiety is an unpleasant, emotional state that involves a complex combination of emotions that include fear, apprehension, and worry. It is often accompanied by physical sensations such as heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath, or tension headache.

Anxiety is often described as having cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components (Seligman, Walker & Rosenhan, 2001). The cognitive component entails expectation of a diffuse and uncertain danger. Somatically the body prepares the organism to deal with threat (known as an emergency reaction): blood pressure and heart rate are increased, sweating is increased, bloodflow to the major muscle groups is increased, and immune and digestive system functions are inhibited. Externally, somatic signs of anxiety may include pale skin, sweating, trembling, and pupillary dilation. Emotionally, anxiety causes a sense of dread or panic and physically causes nausea, and chills. Behaviorally, both voluntary and involuntary behaviors may arise directed at escaping or avoiding the source of anxiety. These behaviors are frequent and often maladaptive, being most extreme in anxiety disorders. However, anxiety is not always pathological or maladaptive: it is a common emotion along with fear, anger, sadness, and happiness, and it has a very important function in relation to survival.

Neural circuitry involving the amygdala and hippocampus is thought to underlie anxiety (Rosen & Schulkin, 1998). When confronted with unpleasant and potentially harmful stimuli such as foul odors or tastes, PET-scans show increased bloodflow in the amygdala (Zald & Pardo, 1997; Zald, Hagen & Pardo, 2002). In these studies, the participants also reported moderate anxiety. This might indicate that anxiety is a protective mechanism designed to prevent the organism from engaging in potentially harmful behaviors.

Answer 2

Many people have heard about anxiety, and many of us have someone so close to them who already suffered or still suffering from this mental illness. So what exactly is anxiety?

Anxiety is a term used to describe a situation in which the person feels uncomfortable and it could be caused by different disorders that probably turn into physical symptoms as being tense, nervous and worry and the list is long…

Have you ever felt nervous before an exam or when giving a speech? If the answer is yes don’t worry because it’s the normal way the body reacts when facing a challenging situations and this lead us to know what anxiety is all about, it is just the reaction of the body to protect itself from what can be considered as a harmful situation or when being outside of the comfort zone...

read the full article

Answer 3

Anxiety can be many things. It consists of thoughts, feelings, and actions. The thoughts could be what your thinking about that make you feel anxious (this can be physical syptoms, a feeling of discomfort, feeling overwhelmed, anything along those lines). The feelings can be any type of emotion or could also be how you feel physically. The actions are what you do to manage anxiety. This could be taking medication, meditation, CBT, avoidance, those sorts of things. But anxiety is always being nervous, overwhelmed, scared, uncomfortable anything like that. Depression can come with it as well, but that's only in extreme cases when people start to avoid things like leaving the house or disconnecting from friends and family. Hope I helped!

Answer 4

Anxiety is a intense fear of the unknown. I experienced this before but I was able to overcome anxiety or panic attacks. This is not easy to overcome but there are a lot of ways on how you can eradicate this type of illness. I read a very helpful article about this matter. Try checking this out this is the method and ways that cure my anxiety attacks. http://www.lifestylenurse.com/panic-and-anxiety-attacks-are-over/

Anxiety can be fixed and no need to worry about it anymore.

All the best,

Jeff

Answer 5

Anxiety is different from anxiety disorders. If you'd like to know about the second, simple google. There are usually 6 classifications, and simple written tests can determine whether or not you haver them and to what degree. Tests are based on truthful answers you give and are behavioral problems which should be dealt with.

Answer 6

Anxiety most of the people experience anxiety at some point of time.
Anxiety occurs due to run in families, biochemical changes as well as part of your emotional behaviour. Anxiety ocurs commonly due to stressful situations, but it was dangerous in some cases due to excessive levels and people feels dread in everyday situations.Some common symptoms of anxiety include: Rapid or increase of heart rate, sweating, nausea, lack of concentration, or unworried thoughts are some of the symptoms of anxiety. I found some useful information at http://seahealth.org/anxiety

Answer 7

There are a million things that define Anxiety but, personally, i had panic attacks & agraphobia. It is a fear of normal everyday life. I couldnt sleep with the lights off, leave the house for a long time, check the mail box, eat in public, nauseous, vertigo, etc.

Answer 8

Anxiety often comes and goes.

Anxiety is a state of fear of real or imagined danger, which is manifested as increased heart rate, trembling, panic, weakness, extreme fatigue and stomach or intestinal discomfort.

Anxiety, depression, nervousness, worry or stress can cause over 100 symptoms or health problems as as in http://au.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkmYCx0ZQ5CUA.T4L5gt.?p=%22over+100+anxiety+symptoms%22&fr2=sb-top&fr=ush-ans&type_param=&rd=r1

Prescription medication for anxiety, stress, nervousness, depression and worry can give you bad side effects so natural remedies are often much better.

Natural remedies for anxiety, stress, nervousness, worry and depression include exercise, Yoga, Chamomile tea, Melatonin, 5-HTP, Valerian Root, other herbs, vitamin B complex and other remedies as in http://au.search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22natural+anxiety+remedies%22&fr=ush-ans

Answer 9

I wrote this article for TheGlassHouseGirls.com this week - and it has managed to filter out to many more people than i had ever imagined possible. I hope it can help some people understand Anxiety a little more! PLEASE feel free to comment on the article and let me know if it has helped in anyway!

http://theglasshousegirls.com/articles/the-living-room/anxiety-in-a-nutshell.html

Answer 10

Sometimes the symptoms are severe and similar to a heart attack. Other times they are minimal. I had a panic attack once before. I let myself get freaked out (over something stupid, I might add) and I got very dizzy and couldn't breath, which turned into an asthma attack. I also got really shaking all over and couldn't sit still. Always thought panic attacks were made up untill I had one. Hope that helps.