Is Anxiety Controlling your Life?
There are many types of anxiety disorders including Social Anxiety Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Phobias. Anxiety Disorders are the most common mental health conditions in the UK. Anxiety is a healthy human reaction to internal and external stress, but if you have an anxiety disorder you will be living with excessive fear, dread and worry. When confronted with certain situations our body launches what is called the stress response, the fight or flight response, or anxiety.
The stress response also becomes activated when you sense danger, empowering your body to defend itself through fight or flight. The physiological response begins in the amygdala, also known as the stress response centre,. From there, a series of cascading events get set in motion, preparing you for fight or flight or making you anxious.
The amygdala processes sensations from all your nerves. When it interprets a signal as dangerous, it sends impulses to the hypothalamus, which stimulates the adrenal glands to release adrenaline – the stress hormone. Adrenaline works on your brain, changing signals and prompts that increase your heartbeat, blood pressure, and breathing.
The brain uses oxygen to increase your alertness and focus on the stress so you can quickly resolve it or eliminate the danger. Muscles use the energy to increase their rate of contraction and relaxation for fight or flight. The physiological response feels like hyper-alertness, diminished concentration on other activities, but the stressor, and uncontrollable muscle spasms.
The increased breathing feels like a heart attack. However, it is hyperventilation. Heightened breathing reduces the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, causing you to feel breathless, dizzy, weak, and pain in your chest, and tingling in your hands and feet. You may also notice you have superhuman strength or what is commonly known as the adrenaline rush. The focus enables you to act on a whim to lift a heavy object, avoid oncoming traffic, or get your hand off a burning flame.
When experiencing an anxiety disorder you will have the same feelings of fear and the accompanied physical responses, when you are not in real danger. These mental and physical responses can be extremely distressing. It’s common for people who have experienced a long-term anxiety disorder to believe this is just they way they are, however this is not the case. With the help of therapy you can overcome anxiety disorders.
Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
GAD causes both psychological and physical symptoms which vary from person to person. Typically, you will feel uncontrollably nervous and worried. Concentration and sleep may be impacted. You may have irrational thoughts, and experience symptoms such as increased heart-rate, sweating and shaking.
Social Anxiety Disorder
Social Anxiety Disorder is a long-term fear of social situations. It presents by a persistent and intense fear of being watched, and judged by others, and of being embarrassed or humiliated in public. Much time is spent worrying about the thoughts and opinions of others.
Panic Attack
Panic disorder is a sever feeling of fear and panic which can occur regularly, and for no apparent reason. This results in intense feelings that reach their peak within a few minutes. This can be an extremely frightening experience.
Phobias
A phobia is an intense and irrational fear of an animal, object, place or situation. Phobias are more intense than fears, they can cause psychological and physical reactions that are debilitating and overwhelming. A phobia can result in a person avoiding certain situations.
Why Am I Feeling Anxious?
The Subconscious Mind
The subconscious mind is a huge memory bank that stores absolutely everything, even when we are asleep our subconscious mind is hard at work. It stores everything that you have seen, done or thought. A massive ninety percent of all information we take in is stored in our subconscious mind, the remaining ten percent is stored in our conscious mind. It stores our beliefs, memories, skills and previous experiences.
If we have had negative past experiences, a belief system is created based on this negative experience. For example; as a child we may have witnessed an adult scream when they seen a spider. Even witnessing this fear from another person is enough for a message to be sent to our mind that spiders are scary. This incident could have led to a life-long fear of spiders. Your conscious mind knows they are harmless but before you can process this thought, the subconscious mind has already kicked in and you are filled with terror.
In therapy we can change any outdated beliefs that are no longer serving us by working with the sub-conscious mind. When we change negative or distorted thoughts and beliefs, we can learn to manage the symptoms of anxiety disorders. This can be achieved in therapy by using modalities such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and Hypnosis.