Do you have symptoms of an anxiety disorder?

What Is Anxiety?

Are you wondering if you have symptoms of an anxiety disorder? Do you know what anxiety is? What it looks like?

Well, anxiety is a general term, but within that broad heading there are considerable numbers of specific anxiety disorders: things like phobias, panic disorder (PD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and health anxiety.

All of these specifically defined anxiety problems share a number of characteristics.  These include a strong element of worry, a need to control exposure to threat, troubling intrusive thoughts and images and unpleasant physical sensations.

Symptoms of an anxiety disorder

So, when you’re anxious you can be consumed with feelings of dread, you can find it impossible to concentrate and  you can feel jumpy and irritable.

The physical symptoms of an anxiety attack can leave you feeling unable to breathe, with a pounding heart, experiencing profuse sweating, dizziness, headaches, diarrhoea, insomnia, tremors or twitches.

Symptoms of an anxiety disorder: How does anxiety affect you?

You may have noticed that the symptoms of anxiety share many of the characteristics of fear, but they are often less intense than outright terror.  Anxiety tends to involve a generalised and ongoing sense of uneasiness, fretting, and inability to relax.  This fact makes it hard to understand and deal with the symptoms of anxiety effectively.  Anxiety problems commonly spoil the quality of your life.  At its root, anxiety it is an overestimation of threat.

Watch this short film which focuses on the most pertinent aspect of all the anxiety disorders.  This is the overestimation of threat.

Symptoms of an anxiety disorder: Getting treatment

You may feel like you’re alone but anxiety is very common. A vast sea of people around the globe suffers from the symptoms of anxiety, although relatively few get any help overcoming anxiety. And yet, anxiety is very treatable, often with very good results.

The best psychological treatment for anxiety problems is CBT therapy. It is effective because it is able to directly challenge the anxiety-provoking thoughts, beliefs, emotions and behaviours that create the difficult experience of anxiety.

The Active Self Help for Depression, Anxiety and Stress System contains free resources which will show you how to make CBT therapy work for you without having to visit a therapist to gain access to anxiety cures.

When you sign up to the free DrPurves.com newsletter you’ll receive the free four killer apps designed to cut worry in half. These will help you gain some mastery over the symptoms of anxiety.

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