Anxiety is an issue that affects up to 40% of people and that might even be an underestimate! There are many different kinds of anxiety including social anxiety, phobias, mutism, general anxiety, OCD and panic attacks so you can see why there are a lot of people affected. That’s ignoring all the people who naturally have an anxious temperament who suffer at the subclinical level.
There are also many different symptoms of anxiety varying from the psychological to the physical. These can include:
Physical
- Sweating
- Feeling your heart beating in your chest
- Butterflies in the stomach
- Headaches
- Constipation
- Restlessness
- Difficulty sleeping
- Nausea
- Lightheadedness
- Chest pain
Psychological
- Irritability
- Nervousness
- Difficulty concentrating
- Being unable to think about anything else other than what’s making you anxious
- Feelings of fear
- Feelings of worry
As you can see many of these symptoms are physical so it’s entirely possible to not feel particularly worried emotionally but to be experiencing intense anxiety in your body. So it’s important to keep track of how things are going and evaluate how you really feel about life events.
Sometimes anxiety can be completely natural in which case you probably don’t need to worry. This can be because of positive events like an upcoming proposal or it can be due to negative events like an upcoming performance review. Either way its probably natural to feel anxious in those circumstances as long as it’s short term and not significantly affecting your life.
The specific biological cause of anxiety is unknown but on a more personal level it often comes from some sort of tragedy or inciting event. For example you get bitten by a dog and thus become afraid of dogs. Stimulant drugs like caffeine can make even subclinical anxiety worse which is one of the reasons coffee can make people so jittery. What’s really more important than what causes anxiety is understanding what makes it worse and how you can get help.
Anxiety is very complicated because it is self maintaining. When you get anxious about something you want to avoid it because it makes you feel bad. This goes for both normal and disordered anxiety, yet this typically only makes anxiety work as it builds the fear up to be more and more important. The same goes for rumination which is thinking about something over and over. When that happens the most common solution is to again avoid thinking about it which means you never get to do the thinking and learning to help your anxiety. The perfect example of these points is again dog phobia. Most of us love dogs they’re cute and loving and hard to hate. Yet people who are scared of dogs avoid them and thus never have the opportunity to learn that. Instead every time they see a dog it’s a negative experience because all they remember is the fear the dog caused. Meaning the next time they see a dog they fear the dog and the anxiety the dog causes. A similar process occurs in most anxiety.
This is why a psychologist can be so helpful because they can draw you out of your own head and help you confront your fears. This is called exposure therapy and is particularly useful for phobias, including social phobia, where its possible to physically confront a situation and show someone it’s not as bad as they originally thought. Other than that a psychologist can go through exercises that help you better cope with anxiety. A common technique is called mindfulness meditation which involves letting thoughts roll over you without judgement.
General relaxation techniques can also help just by reducing your heart rate and helping you to calm down after an anxiety inducing event. A technique that is meant for social phobia but can be useful for other anxieties as well is the “good, bad, medium approach”. This involves thinking of the best case scenario, the worst case scenario and then thinking of something that is in between the two. Then you think about which is the most likely (or if you’re so anxious you honestly aren’t sure you can ask someone else) and typically it isn’t the worst case scenario. Over time this can help you evaluate the real vs imagined threat of a situation and help you be more realistic in how you view the world.
References
Chand SP, Marwaha R. Anxiety. [Updated 2023 Apr 24]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470361/
Munir S, Takov V. Generalized Anxiety Disorder. [Updated 2022 Oct 17]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441870/
Craske, M. G., & Stein, M. B. (2016). Anxiety. The Lancet (British Edition), 388(10063), 3048–3059. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30381-6
Knowles, K. A., & Olatunji, B. O. (2020). Specificity of trait anxiety in anxiety and depression: Meta-analysis of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Clinical Psychology Review, 82, 101928–101928. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101928
Francis, S. E., & Roemhild, E. (2021). Assessing parental cognitions about child anxiety: Are parents’ thoughts about child anxiety associated with child anxiety and anxiety sensitivity? Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 80, 102400–102400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2021.102400
Kotov, R., Gamez, W., Schmidt, F., & Watson, D. (2010). Linking “Big” Personality Traits to Anxiety, Depressive, and Substance Use Disorders: A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(5), 768–821. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020327
Carl, E., Witcraft, S. M., Kauffman, B. Y., Gillespie, E. M., Becker, E. S., Cuijpers, P., Van Ameringen, M., Smits, J. A. J., & Powers, M. B. (2020). Psychological and pharmacological treatments for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 49(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2018.1560358
Olatunji, B. O., & Wolitzky-Taylor, K. B. (2009). Anxiety Sensitivity and the Anxiety Disorders: A Meta-Analytic Review and Synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 135(6), 974–999. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017428