What is Panic and Anxiety Disorder?
November 29, 2009 by Rizaro
Filed under Health News
Broadly speaking a panic and anxiety disorder is said to occur when the level of anxiety in a person’s life is raised to the point where it interferes with their daily life. The anxiety of course is brought about by stress, or rather by stress of an inordinate degree.
There may be a gradual build up of stress in a person’s life due to a succession of problems or adverse events, such as a divorce, losing your job or having a debilitating illness. There may be one single traumatic event such as a car crash or losing a close family member, which triggers an excess of anxiety which can be manifest in different ways. There is a range of panic attack medication available although medication is not always right for everyone.
Anxiety disorders are classified to some extent by their cause, as for example post-traumatic stress, but more their symptoms and effects on behaviour. The different types of anxiety disorder that are recognised are: general anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive anxiety, social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
General anxiety disorder is by definition a fairly generalised anxiety often coupled with depression which cannot really be pinned on one specific cause. It may just result from a stress overload, where a person has several areas of stress in their life which they just about manage to deal with, and then, something fairly trivial can just be enough to upset their equilibrium and push them over the edge into an anxious state where they start to exhibit symptoms. These may be irritability, loss of sleep, depression, mood swings, headaches, difficulty in concentrating, or other problems that prevent a person functioning as per normal.
Panic anxiety causes an individual to suffer from repeated short lived episodes of extreme panic and fear for no apparent reason. These attacks can come on suddenly, without warning and be extremely frightening. Some subconscious trigger causes the body to go into emergency “fight or flight” mode with a sudden increase in heart rate and rapid breathing accompanied by an outpouring of adrenaline.
The effect of all this is to cause feelings of fear and death, chest tightness or pain, dizziness, blurring of vision, trembling, difficulty in breathing and possible headache. A person experiencing this for the very first time is likely to think they are having a heart attack which produces more fear and deepens or prolongs the attack.
These attacks, although frightening, are just an inappropriate body response and not harmful. Psychologically though, they can be harmful by causing an individual constant worry about when and where the next attack might occur.
Obsessive-compulsive anxiety is a type of anxiety disorder where a person seems to have worrying or disturbing thoughts that have no basis in reality, and they seek to expunge these thoughts somehow by acting out rituals or developing compulsive habits such as frequent hand washing. The compulsive behaviours typically take up a great deal of time and are completely unproductive in any real sense, so cause considerable disruption of a persons life.
A person suffering from social phobia shows a marked and disproportionate fear of social situations, particularly with strangers. There is a fear of embarrassment or humiliation by not acting the right way or a feeling that everyone is looking at, and judging the person.
Post-traumatic stress is fairly self explanatory and understandable in that a severely traumatic incident, usually involving the fear of death, leads to a prolonged anxiety and often repeated flashbacks of the event.
All these types of anxiety disorder can undermine a persons self confidence and make them less effective in their daily routine. This in itself can lead to depression and yet more anxiety so that, if no help is sought, the situation can get worse. With the correct help however, the situation can be turned around and a person can revert to a normal way of life within a reasonably short time.
Will Mcardle is a sufferer of Anxiety and Panic Disorder and his aim is to help fellow sufferers beat panic and anxiety disorder. For more info and help visit http://www.infoforpanicattacks.com Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/what-is-panic-and-anxiety-disorder-1516778.html
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