Sydney Anxiety Disorders Practice
About Anxiety
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a common emotion that is needed to survive and is experienced by all people. Other words used to describe the emotion include fear, shyness, worry, nerves, or stressed. People differ in the extent and degree to which they experience anxiety and in the types of situations that produce anxiety. When an individual experiences anxiety to such an extent that it reduces their enjoyment of life or impacts on their daily functioning, they may benefit from seeking help.
Symptoms of Anxiety
Prolonged or intense anxiety may lead to physical symptoms such as sweating, a racing or pounding heart, blushing, trembling, nausea, or feeling dizzy. Anxiety generally occurs as a response to a feared situation and is exacerbated by negative or fearful thoughts.
Types of Anxiety Problems
When people have a problem with anxiety, it commonly takes one of several main forms. Of course it is important to note that anxious individuals often experience more than one of these forms of anxiety.
Generalised Anxiety Disorder
People who suffer from what is known as Generalised Anxiety Disorder are typically experiencing excessive levels of worry. Common areas of worry can include family, health, career, finances and especially daily, minor events and hassles. For people with generalised anxiety, their worries can seem to be out of control and take up a large part of their day. It is quite common for GAD sufferers to also experience sleep difficulties (having difficulty falling asleep and/or staying asleep) because of their excessive worrying.
Health Anxiety
Often referred to as ‘Hypochondriasis’, Health Anxiety involves an ongoing pattern of catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily symptoms and/or health related information. Sufferers worry that they have a serious disease as they misinterpret their physical and/or mental health symptoms. Health anxiety sufferers will worry excessively and often continue to worry even after consulting their doctor and being given reassurance.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder usually experience fearful thoughts, images, or even urges, which run through their minds over and over again in a repeated pattern. Some common themes include thoughts about contamination and germs, images of losing control, feelings that things are not “just right”, or thoughts about things not being in the right order or not being completed. These thoughts or urges often lead to particular actions that are repeated over and over and are aimed at preventing or undoing the beliefs. For example, people might wash themselves repeatedly, check repeatedly, or repeat certain signs or phrases.
Panic Disorder
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
From time to time, many people in our society will go through a traumatic, life-threatening event such as a rape, car accident, or natural disaster. Following these events, it is common to experience extreme distress, often lasting for some time. In most cases, this distress decreases with time. When the distress is especially high and does not seem to decrease over the expected time, it is often referred to as a post-traumatic reaction. People who experience post-traumatic reactions often report quite marked symptoms such as a blank memory for the event, strong feelings of unreality, extreme jumpiness, and sleep difficulties.
Social Anxiety Disorder
People who suffer what is often called Social Phobia or Social Anxiety Disorder typically worry a great deal about what other people will think about them. As a result of these worries, they fear or even avoid social activities such as going on dates, attending meetings, giving talks, being assertive, and even writing or drinking in front of other people. Social Anxiety Disorder can also be specific to only certain performance situations, such as public speaking or musical performance. Social anxiety is one of the most common forms of anxiety in the population.
Specific Phobias
A Specific Phobia is a type of anxiety disorder whereby a person experiences an extreme or irrational fear when directly confronted with a specific situation or object or in anticipation of the feared situation or object. Even though the situation or object poses little or no actual danger to the individual, they often cannot control their fear towards it and will actively avoid it at all costs. Although people with specific phobias recognise the irrationality of their fears, the thought of these fears alone is often enough to cause tremendous, debilitating anxiety. These irrational fears can therefore significantly interfere with functioning in one or more areas of life, including personal relationships, work, school and leisure activities.
Specific Phobias are commonly categorised into 5 types
- Animal Phobias (e.g., dogs, snakes, or spiders)
- Natural Environment Phobias (e.g., heights, storms, water)
- Blood-Injection-Injury Phobias (e.g., fear of seeing blood, receiving a blood test or injection, watching television shows that display medical procedures)
- Situational Phobias (e.g., airplanes, elevators, driving, enclosed places)
- Other Phobias (e.g., phobic avoidance of situations that may lead to choking, vomiting, or contracting an illness)