Common Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety and fear are natural reactions to threatening situations. Your body has a fight or flight reactionyour heart races, you breathe faster, you sweat, and your stomach and head may ache. Thats all normal if youre really in danger. But if these reactions keep occurring when youre not in danger to the point where they disrupt your life, theyre called anxiety disorders. No one knows exactly what causes anxiety disorders.

Heredity, stress, and changes in the brain probably play a part. Over their lifetimes, about 25% of Americans experience some form of anxiety disorder, and about 17% of these have very severe anxiety every year. Women are more likely than men to be affected. The good news is that many treatments are available to relieve anxiety disorders. These are the most common types of anxiety disorder:

Generalized anxiety disorder is a pattern of serious anxiety and worry that lasts 6 months or more. The anxiety is out of proportion to the situation. Typically, the worries focus on health, safety, and work responsibilities. People with this disorder have three or more of these signs and symptoms: muscle tension, restlessness, fatigue, trouble concentrating, irritability, and sleep disturbances (too much or too little sleep).

Panic disorder causes panic attacksrepeated, unpredictable, and irrational attacks of fear and anxiety. Within 10 to 20 minutes of the start of a panic attack, a person develops at least four of these signs and symptoms: shortness of breath, dizziness or feeling faint, heart palpitations, nausea, a choking sensation, sweating, flushing, chills, trembling, numbness or tingling, chest pain or discomfort, feeling afraid of dying or losing control, and feeling detached from reality. The symptoms are usually strongest within 10 minutes and go away minutes later, although some panic attacks last for hours.

Social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, is a persistent and irrational fear of social or performance situations, such as parties and picnics. Many people feel uncomfortable in these situations, but someone with social phobia is so fearful that he may avoid these situations entirely. Being in social situations can cause him great distress and may trigger a panic attack. During and after the experience, he cant stop thinking about his words and actions and criticizing himself. This disorder affects men and women equally, and also occurs in children.

Posttraumatic stress disorder is a response to the memory of physical or emotional trauma. This disorder can develop if youve experienced an extremely stressful, usually life-threatening event, such as a natural disaster, war, terrorism, assault, sexual abuse, or domestic abuse. Someone with this problem repeatedly relives the event or has dreams about it, avoids people, places, and objects that remind him of the event, or even loses interest in life. He may also become irritable, have difficulty concentrating, and have trouble sleeping.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder makes a person feel that he must perform an ordinary action, such as hand washing, so often that he cant get on with his normal activities. Someone with this disorder has a persistent, unwanted, intrusive thought (an obsession), and responds with an action (a compulsion) in an attempt to reduce overwhelming anxiety. They know the behavior is excessive, but cant stop themselves. This disorder, which affects men and women equally, can develop at any time, but is usually diagnosed in young adults.

Procedural anxiety is extreme fear of medical procedures (more than normal anxiety) that interferes with daily activities. For days or weeks before a procedure, the person worries all the time, cant sleep, and is restless, nervous, apprehensive, and tense. This disorder can be caused by a previous traumatic experience, fear of pain, or fear of the unfamiliar.

Keith Bronson is a former panic disorder sufferer who supports the mental health community through his articles and web site http://www.severe-social-anxiety.com.

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