Anxiety is a word that in today’s society gets thrown around a lot. Anxiety is a normal and common emotion that everyone experiences at least once in their life however anxiety as a psychological disorder is very different. Anxiety disorder is an umbrella and under it falls a number of different forms that include but are not limited to: panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, specific phobias, and generalized anxiety disorder. With all these forms of anxiety comes a variety of different things that trigger this constant worry that can be overwhelming. Form me personally, the one that I struggle with in my day to day life is generalized anxiety disorder.
Generalized anxiety disorder is defined as “the persistent and excessive worry about a number of things” (Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)). This disorder is a lot more likely to be found in woman and it affects around 3.1% of the United States population. With this disorder the person will find themselves worrying about things that others find insignificant. People with this disorder find it difficult to control what they’re feeling, they find themselves hopeless to their anxiety and this constant worry can be debilitating to those who don’t know how to handle it. With this anxiety comes multiple symptoms that include the persistent worry with the inability to relax, not being able to let go of the anxiety and find it difficult to deal with uncertainty. People with anxiety may have the feeling of restlessness or may have difficulty concentrating or find that they perceive a lot of situations as threatening when they aren’t. Victims of anxiety tend to take simple events out of proportion and tend to over thing the worst-case scenario to the point where they’re indecisive and have a constant fear of making the wrong decision. However, generalized anxiety disorder is not limited to just this, there are many physical symptoms that come with this disorder. These symptoms include: trouble sleeping, fatigue, tension in muscles, sweating, nausea, trembling and irritability. With this psychological disorder like any other, it’s very important to know when it’s necessary to seek help. This usually occurs when the person finds that they worry too much, and the anxiety is starting to interfere with their day to day life and if the anxiety has grown to make you feel depressed or irritable. For people with generalized anxiety disorder and any other anxiety disorder it’s important to realize that it’s not something that goes away on its own. This disorder, similar to many other psychological disorders is caused by biological and environmental factors like brain chemistry, development and genetics. With me personally anxiety runs in my family and it’s something that’s affected a lot of people in my life.
Anxiety is something that I’ve always felt in my day to day life. When I was younger, I didn’t know what was causing me to feel the way that I felt, and it was very hard for me to understand why I felt a certain way when other people my age didn’t. Everything in my life when I was younger would cause me anxiety, the one place where I noticed it the most was the first day of school. Granted the first day of school for any little kid was not a happy day, no one wanted summer to end but I noticed, with me, it was different. The first day of school was something I dreaded from the day school let out and it was something that overtook my mind to the point where it was all I could think about. The main symptom I would notice was the nausea and stomach pain and I had a huge difficulty swallowing. The night before the first day it was so difficult for me to sleep to the point where I would stay up the whole night until 6 in the morning when I had to wake up for school. Every first day of school was the same, I knew in my mind that nothing bad was going to happen to me and that it was a normal part of life that I had to go through but for some reason I always had that overwhelming worry and anxiety and no matter how hard I would try it wouldn’t go away and it kept coming back. Although I was very young I knew that whatever I was feeling, it was something that I had to take care of because it was ruining a lot of things for me and the thing that I found the most frustrating was that I would worry so much about different situations, but at the end of the day, everything was fine and nothing that I worried about came true and I had gone through everything I went through for no reason. It was during this time that my mom first decided to take me to therapy, I was really young, and they told my mom that what I had was in fact generalized anxiety disorder. The therapy helped and slowly I started to lose my anxiety to the point where I thought I didn’t need the therapy anymore, I always felt that worry lingering in my life, but it wasn’t to the point where I let it overtake everything. As my anxiety started to go away, and I was reaching the age where I was going to start high school, my mom agreed that it was okay to stop therapy. I got along okay without therapy for a while and again, although I would always feel that worry it wasn’t to the point where it was overwhelming anymore, however that changed once I got to high school.
The day before the first day of high school was the first time in a while, I felt the same anxiety I felt when I was younger to the point where it was overwhelming. The night before I couldn’t sleep, and I stayed up until 6 in the morning the same way I use to when I was younger. It was honestly sad to me that no matter how excited I was to start high school and start this new stage in my life, my anxiety ruined it for me. In the morning I felt the stomach pain and the nausea to the point where I had to make my mom pull over on the way there, so I could throw up. After that day I decided that I needed to find a way to calm my anxiety on my own. I started working on strategies to relax myself and learned to cope with the worry and fear in a way that made dealing with everything easier. In my life today, I work to remember what I was taught in therapy when I was younger and meditate to find that peace and relaxation to make the anxiety go away and although it works, I still experience the same anxiety at least once a day however not to the extreme as I use to. When I was younger, I would always have panic attacks and feel out of control of my body and my thoughts, but I think that now I have a control that I didn’t before. There are random things in my day to day life that trigger my anxiety like meeting new people and talking in from of big crowds, I also find it difficult to participate in class a lot because college is something that is so new to me, but I know that as time goes on, I’ll get better and better at controlling it.
Overall generalized anxiety disorder is something that I know I will always struggle with in my day to day life, but I feel like I’ve found a way to cope and grow from what I’ve gone through. Anxiety is a psychological disorder that comes in different forms and affect a lot of people around the world and I think it’s very important for people to know that there are treatments for this disorder including therapy that really helped me as well as medication. There are many different forms of therapy that a person with an anxiety disorder can participate in like supportive and interpersonal therapy. Cognitive behavioral treatment is also something that can be used, it has been researched more over the years and it targets specifically thoughts and physical symptoms and behaviors. Acceptance Commitment Therapy is another form of therapy that can be very beneficial. Therapy is a great way for the person to learn what triggers their anxiety and learn to be less afraid and handle it in a way that will have a positive outcome. Exercise and mediation are another huge way that can benefit a person with GAD and I know it’s the main thing that helped me once I got older. Medication is also an option for a person struggling with this disorder an example of this would be Xanax and there are a lot of homeopathic and over the counter medications that can be taken as well. All in all, anxiety disorders can affect people in many different ways and can progress to the point where they it becomes very debilitating but with the right treatment, it doesn’t have to be something that comes in the way of a person leading a happy and healthy life.