When Anxiety Becomes a Disorder
Some will claim they have an anxiety disorder, but they may end up having everyday anxiety. On the other hand, others may think their chronic anxiety is something normal. In this post, we will differentiate between regular and chronic anxiety.
First, What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a normal human response to life’s dangers. When you feel anxious, your body may seem restless. You may sweat, feel nausea, or have other symptoms that make you fear off.
Feeling anxious is a natural survival instinct. In modern times, it even has its uses. You may feel anxious for a first date or feel uneasy due to a speech. Some levels of anxiety can help you prepare for significant events.
If you’re anxious about a first date, you may try harder to take care of yourself. If you feel anxious over a test, you may spend extra time studying.
However, if you have excessive anxiety, it may lead to you having mental health issues.
When Anxiety Affects You
The anxiety issue is that many life events can flood your body with it. For instance, the COVID pandemic may fill you with worry, and make it challenging for you to go outside.
Anxiety disorder is the main issue. The anxiety that comes from it tends to be known as problematic anxiety. Usually, this anxiety is based on irrational or chronic experiences, and too much of it may make it difficult to live your life.
You may fear meeting new people, you may stay up at night, and you may have unnatural fears. All this anxiety can lead to you avoiding friends, family, and potential partners.
The Types of Anxiety Disorders
Several different types of anxiety disorders can lead to issues living your life. Here are some of them.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD, involves the suffering of having chronic anxiety for six months or more. GAD can occur at any time and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all.
OCD
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, is when you have obsessions and recurrent thoughts that you do not want. These thoughts come with compulsions, which are repetitive behaviors you perform to try to stop those thoughts. For example, hand washing. Not doing those rituals can lead to you having more anxiety.
Panic Disorder
Panic disorder is when you have repeated panic attacks, leading to intense feelings of dread and fear.
PTSD
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, happens after a traumatic event. This event may lead to you having an episode of intense anxiety and fear whenever you think of the trauma. PTSD tends to require professional care.
Social Anxiety
Social anxiety disorder is when you feel anxious doing activities in your daily life. For example, you may have difficulties talking to other people, going outside, or doing other menial tasks.
Anxiety is Treatable
Some anxiety is essential for life, but if you have an anxiety disorder, this may be a cause for you to avoid living life to the fullest.
For an anxiety disorder, a combination of therapy and medication may be the ticket for you to feel better. Online therapy websites such as BetterHelp can allow you to have some peace of mind and get back on the right track.
A therapist may teach you to avoid triggers for your anxiety and guide you to manage your symptoms whenever they come.
In addition, you may be given medication to help manage the symptoms.
There is no shame in getting help if you need it. Talk to a therapist today and see what they can do for you.
Marie Miguel has been a writing and research expert for nearly a decade, covering a variety of health- related topics. Currently, she is contributing to the expansion and growth of a free online mental health resource with BetterHelp.com. With an interest and dedication to addressing stigmas associated with mental health, she continues to specifically target subjects related to anxiety and depression.
Comments
I am feeling anxiety about gong back onsite. I keep getting emails that the next stage is to go to 100% soon. It took me 6 months to get into the Covid groove. I got use to it and even begin to enjoy being at home, no deadlines, some free time for hobbies. My family and I even got to spend 6 months in Teluride. I was even hoping we do that again this year but I suppose not. Like many others at the labs I kind of let my thinking skills slide during the lockdowns. I am worried about having to go in again and start anew. I think it may take 6 more months to get back up to speed. I wish the labs would acknowledge this and allow for some more adjustment time for many of us maybe even some days of recovery. I have only been onsite once in 1.5 years. This is frightening and many of my friends are feeling the same thing.
I have been very effective working from home and getting far more accomplished then spending time at the office. I dread going back and loosing the ability to concentrate on my projects.
I also worry about the ongoing infection rate at the Lab I work at, how there has been a break through infection, and the generally surliness of those not vaccinated. There have been incidents of non-vaccinated individuals not following the rules (mask wearing or getting tested when asked).
I am tried of dealing with people's justifications the no vaccination debates.
I appreciate people want a choice with their bodies. Being female the choice of body autonomy is ludicrously a non-starter. With the restrictions around birth control, baby making body parts is radically different from state to state. I just don't have the energy to listen vaccination debates.
I have been very effective working from home and getting far more accomplished then spending time at the office. I dread going back and loosing the ability to concentrate on my projects."
On the whole some things slowed down at the labs but not by very much and some things probably sped up. Many people could not only work form home but could do so much more effectively. I also know people who came in on select times to do certain work that could only be done onsite and found that that if they did not have to deal with anything else that they could easily do it within the time frame and do the work effectively. I think the lesson to be learned is that when the lab is open a huge amount of your time is spent of total time wasting junk. One thing is that there was a reduction in useless meetings, bizarre paper chases, random people just showing up to talk time talking about non-work stuff or asking for help something they could easily have figured out themselves if they put in a tiny bit of effort. Another thing is that there was less time for people complaining about lab politics during work hours. During the lockdown you did you work at home or came in did you work with few interruptions. Many of the interactions with administration also improved. You would email in some questions to the admin and they would get back to you in a timely fashion, where before many would never respond to email and the only way to get something done was to go to the office and wait for them to finish with some person or their door would be closed while they gossiped and after hour the door would open they would say come back later in the week. If you had a visitor you would spend hours at the badge office as something always goes wrong, and then spend hours more trying to get a reimbursement for the speaker or visitor. Other things arose like a lab computer would not be working and day after day could be spent trying to get it fixed, while during the stand down these things actually got fixed faster.
I have noticed that some of the most effective people even during the lockdowns where the hard workers who came and worked and would not get bogged down in random time wasting activities. The only problem is that in many cases people would complain that these people where "visible" or they would say so and so is really contributing when in fact that they are just in the hallways gossiping or saying how the the few things they actually did was so great. I think the lockdown showed that so much of the onset activities at the labs is just worthless. Also I hope it showed that there are people that produce and that there are others that simply serve coffee in their office and just run around talking to everyone to convince them that they someone do something.
The biggest improvements have been in admin/business interactions. This is mostly due to the fact that they will now now respond to email the same day or the next. Before they would never respond to emails ever, you have to go to the office and hope you catch them when they are not working on something or they are talking with friends. The problem is that once this becomes the norm it spreads to other organizations. It is hugely time wasting and ineffective. To be clear they would respond to managers but would would never respond to staff. I am not sure what happened over the lock down whether it was just they no longer had an excuse not to respond to emails or they did not have all their friends come around to chat for hours on end.
Worst of remoting in to work: Everyone thinks they need you at their online meeting.