Anxiety Disorder

Anxiety Disorder and symptoms, how to solve this problem

Anxiety Disorder, the social anxiety : Economic problems, work stress, the desire to do everything in a day that we could do in two and the generalized anxious environment has become the main way of life of most of our society. We are facing a fashionable mental illness such as anxiety that is invading people’s lives in an invasive way and it becomes almost urgent to learn to control it in time. This disorder is easy to acquire and difficult to discard but if you follow some tips you will be able to survive with it and not suffer, on a physical level, its consequences.

The truth is that there is no magic formula to eliminate it, but if you manage, at least, to control its performance, you will have won a great battle that many already take for lost and are the majority of the causes of other subsequent illnesses and even work and personal failures. Don’t let an anxiety attack take over your life and detract from your quality of life.

As we have said before, you should be very aware that controlling and overcoming anxiety are two very different concepts and each one involves a series of specific techniques and behaviors. But here you are going to learn how to control it for now so that you don’t end up in despair.

Obviously, most people who suffer from high-grade anxiety attacks and are unable to control it alone, go to psychotherapists specialized in this field applying techniques and dedicating time to them that can change their lives. It’s just a matter of getting down to work, being sure that it will work and wanting to achieve it.

The social Anxiety symptoms

The first thing you should recognize is any of the following symptoms:

Nervousness, restlessness, impatience
Fatigue (excessive tiredness)
Lack of concentration or blank mind
Irritability easily
Muscle tension, tremors, headaches, inability to relax, you think in constant motion
Disturbance in sleep, difficulty falling asleep, waking up tired (non-restful sleep)
Sweating
Palpitations or tachycardia
Gastrointestinal problems
Dry mouth

  • Others (dizziness, hyperventilation)

Tips for calming down
We offer you a series of guidelines to follow so that you can apply them in everyday life and get the most out of them, achieving an improvement in your quality of life and your health, both physical and mental:

  • Do some physical exercise that relaxes you like walking, cycling or yoga. An activity that allows you to stop your mind for a moment and that helps you release all the accumulated tension.
  • Do breathing exercises continuously to oxygenate the body and mind well and to calm the symptoms of anxiety at the moment you notice that you start to suffer a crisis. Deep breathing, filling the lungs well and making the diaphragm work hard, is a good strategy to calm anxiety. The best thing is to try to breathe in as much as possible and then exhale eliminating all the residual air that you contain inside by controlling the way you let the air escape. You will notice how little by little you take control of your body and anxiety disappears.
  • If you can make a weekly planning of your priority issues, they will help you organize your time without having to burden yourself.
  • Reduce the consumption of tobacco, alcohol or caffeine if this is your case since these are your biggest enemies. What at first may seem to calm you down, later, anxiety will surface with greater force and in addition, you will be developing an addiction.
  • Try to share your problems with someone, be it a relative, a friend, a psychologist or a partner.
  • Implement a healthy and balanced diet in your life, especially rich in vitamin B, antioxidants and magnesium that help fight anxiety.

Finally, there is no doubt that everything you do to overcome an anxiety crisis has to be accompanied by a positive and different attitude than the one you have had so far seeing that it has not helped you. Focus all your attention and all your energy on your well-being and feel that what you do you like and benefits you. If some aspects of your life irritate you, then the way to prevent anxiety from returning to your lifestyle, perhaps it can be by proposing to make some changes but from tranquility and rationality.

Work anxiety overview

How to combat work anxiety

Work anxiety: The most widespread disease in our society today is work anxiety disorder that manifests itself through nervousness, exhaustion, fatigue, lack of concentration, sleep disturbance, excessive muscle tension, nervous breakdown, restlessness, etc. However, if you learn to control the situation you will have fought a disorder that causes many job losses. Hence, a high level of anxiety is currently recognized as “burn out”, burnout syndrome.

This new disease is relatively recent since it has been in the XXI century where it has positioned itself more in our society, clearly relating to the workplace and the lifestyle that is led. Basically it is an emotional disorder provoked by work that entails serious physical and psychological consequences when it is somatized in the body.

More and more employees are taking time off work because of the stress that their work causes them and once overcome, the return to the position makes them find themselves in this unpleasant situation again. Burnout syndrome becomes a pathology, sometimes necessary to control and overcome with medication, anxiolytics and even psychological therapies (especially in cases of panic).

The truth is that it can be controlled if you learn to detect the signals that the body manifests in the workplace such as exhaustion, loss of energy, lack of motivation, bad mood, lack of concentration, nervousness and irritability, among many other symptoms. However, physically, sleep disturbance, excessive fatigue, gastrointestinal disorders, headaches, dizziness, back pain, skin eczema, tachycardia, palpitations, etc. can be appreciated.

Why the problem arises
In most cases, job anxiety occurs due to low professional remuneration. The wages are very low and the work is very extensive, with which the worker feels exploited, saturated, surpassed and undervalued. This fact is coupled with the feeling of loss of social prestige.

Normally, schedules are also a priority cause of burn out because they, on many occasions, do not allow to have a full social life and the departure time is always longer than the account, when it is not provided for in the payroll at the end of the month. More is asked for than is paid and the employee is forced to do small favors as obligations imposed by his superior to avoid possible dismissals or uncomfortable angry situations.

Finally, the general work environment is very important for the person to be in a peaceful place where peace and harmony reign. When the group is not united and there are personal and professional discomforts between the employees, discords arise that end up causing unsustainable situations for everyone and an environment where tension could be cut with a scissors. This situation decreases everyone’s concentration and above all, both individual and collective performance.

What to do to reduce anxiety disorder

There are many general recommendations that can be used to eliminate anxiety and increase personal and professional well-being. It may seem difficult but its results are for sure. The actions that are given below are to be carried out personally and individually, some of the following:

  • Balance your life as much as possible
  • Avoid using drugs and alcohol because these substances increase anxiety and nervousness
  • Set the priorities of your life in general
  • Externalize your feelings, thoughts and worries
  • Develop tasks outside of work to feel more useful
  • Learn to accept other people’s help and trust it
  • Do some exercise to eliminate toxins and adrenaline
  • Maintain a nutritious and healthy diet
  • Enjoy your free time doing what satisfies you the most and you like the most
  • Learn to relativize things and not take them so seriously

Most of the time it is we ourselves who provoke the appearance of mental disorders without knowing that life is not so complicated and that adding a few drops of humor in stressful and undesirable situations help us to overcome them successfully and happily.

Work stress one of the problems of the Social Anxiety

Work stress can lead to anxiety and panic attacks

Work stress: Stress occurs as a result of an imbalance between the demands of the environment (internal or external stressors) and the available resources of the subject. Thus, the elements to be considered in the potentially stressful interaction are: situational variables (for example, from the workplace), individual variables of the subject facing the situation and consequences of stress.

Stress can be defined as the process that begins before a set of environmental demands that the individual receives, to which he must give an adequate response, putting in place his coping resources. When the demand of the environment (work, social, etc.) is excessive compared to the coping resources that are possessed, a series of adaptive reactions, resource mobilization, involving physiological activation will develop. This stress reaction includes a series of negative (unpleasant) emotional reactions, of which the most important are: anxiety, anger and depression.

Anxiety and stress

Many times anxiety and stress are used as synonyms, understanding in both cases the same type of emotional reaction, characterized by high physiological activation. However, there are different traditions when it comes to studying both phenomena. Stress is a broader process of adaptation to the environment. Anxiety is an emotional reaction of alertness to a threat. Let’s say that within the process of changes that stress implies, anxiety is the most frequent emotional reaction. Many stimuli or situations can provoke in the individual the need to mobilize resources to respond to the demands of said stimulus, or to return to the initial state of equilibrium in which he was initially. We call the stimulus a stressor, or stressful situation

Work stress

The European Commission, through the European Foundation for the Improvement of the Conditions of Life and Work (1999) has conducted a study on work stress, in which he concludes that 28% of european workers suffer from stress and the 20% burnout (you feel “burned” in their work), being the most affected sectors manual work, specialized transport, restoration, and metallurgy.

The high personal and social costs generated by work stress have led international organizations such as the European Union and WHO to insist more and more on the importance of the prevention and control of stress in the workplace.

Symptoms that work stress can cause

Stress is a complex reaction on a biological, psychological and social level. Most of the biological changes that occur in the body when it is subjected to a stress reaction are not noticeable to humans and diagnostic procedures are required to determine the level of the reaction. However, on a psychological level, many symptoms produced by stress can be easily identified by the person who is undergoing such changes. The most frequent reaction when we are subjected to a stress reaction is anxiety.

The most common anxiety symptoms are:

At the cognitive-subjective level:

  • concern
  • fear
  • insecurity
  • difficulty deciding
  • fear
  • negative thoughts about oneself
  • negative thoughts about our performance in front of others
  • fear that they will realize our difficulties
  • fear of loss of control
  • difficulty thinking, studying, or concentrating

At the physiological level:

  • sweating
  • muscle tension
  • heart palpitation
  • tachycardia
  • tremor
  • discomfort in the stomach
  • other gastric complaints
  • breathing difficulties
  • dry mouth
  • difficulty swallowing
  • headaches
  • dizzy
  • morning sickness
  • discomfort in the stomach
  • shiver

At the motor level:

  • avoidance of feared situations
  • smoking, overeating or drinking
  • motor restlessness (repetitive movements, scratching, touching, etc.)
  • going from one place to another without a specific purpose
  • stutter
  • cry
  • get paralyzed

Stress, in addition to producing anxiety, can produce anger or anger, irritability, sadness-depression, and other emotional reactions, which we can also recognize.

If the stress is very intense and lasts over time, it can lead to physical illnesses and mental disorders, in short health problems.

Consequences of work stress

Initially, stress can energize the activity of the individual causing a process of increasing resources (attention, memory, physiological activation, performance, etc.) that increases productivity. However, when this activation process is very intense or lasts a long time, resources are exhausted and fatigue arrives, as well as loss of performance.

To perform complex tasks, or to increase speed in simple tasks, a certain degree of activation is needed. However, an excess of activation makes it difficult to carry out such activities.

The consequences of stress are manifold, but broadly speaking, it should be noted its negative influence on health, as well as on cognitive impairment and performance.

Stress can negatively influence health in several ways, such as:

1) due to health-related changes in habits.
2) by the alterations produced in the physiological systems (such as the autonomic nervous system and the immune system).
3) by cognitive changes (thoughts) that can affect behavior, emotions and health.

In turn, the development of habits harmful to health, as is the case with addictions, increases stress. Intervention programs for weight reduction, or addiction intervention programs, or the treatment of eating disorders, etc., should include anxiety reduction and stress management techniques, because when this is done they improve their effectiveness.

Stress can produce a high physiological activation that, maintained over time, can cause psychophysiological or psychosomatic dysfunctions, such as tension headaches, cardiovascular problems, digestive problems, sexual problems, etc.; in turn, stress can produce changes in other systems, especially it can produce immunosuppression that increases the risk of infections (such as the flu) and can increase the likelihood of developing immune diseases, such as cancer.

Anxiety reduction training programs improve psychological well-being in all these cases, but also decrease physiological activation and improve the physical symptoms of these diseases (reduction of blood pressure, decrease in tachycardia in arrhythmias, elimination of pain in headaches, etc.

The stress can overwhelm the individual to start to develop a series of biases or errors on cognitive interpretation of their physiological activation, or their conduct, or their thoughts, or in some situations, which in turn lead him to acquire a series of irrational fears, phobias, etc, which are a health problem (the so-called anxiety disorders), but that, in turn, can continue to deteriorating health in other ways. For example, a person subjected to prolonged periods of stress can go on to develop panic attacks, or a crisis of anxiety, which are strong reactions of anxiety, that the individual cannot control, with strong discharges autonomous, fear of a heart attack, etc, During this crisis, the individual mistakenly interprets its physiological activation, and think that you will miss the air (when it is hyperventilating), or that they will die of a heart attack, or mareará and fall on the floor, or they will go crazy, etc Subsequently, these panic attacks are usually complicated by an agoraphobia (avoidance of certain situations that produce anxiety), with a dependence on anxiolytics, sometimes with depression reactions due to not being able to solve their problem, etc.. These anxiety disorders are much more frequent in women than in men (2 to 3 times more frequent), but usually an anxiety crisis coincides with a period of a lot of stress that has lasted a certain time. Between 1.5% and 3.5% of the population suffer from panic disorders with or without agoraphobia. The age of onset is between 17 and 35 years, just at its most productive age.

Stress can also lead to a series of perturbations on the higher cognitive processes (attention, perception, memory, decision making, judgments, etc) and a deterioration of performance in academic contexts or labor, etc., as Well, for example, students with high anxiety assessment presented a decrease in performance, while the training programs in reducing the anxiety of the exams not only reduce it, but it improves academic performance, increasing the half note.

The study of how stress causes interferences on the so-called higher cognitive processes and on performance has been carried out fundamentally from a cognitive-emotional perspective and, without a doubt, the emotion with which the most work has been done when studying this negative influence on cognitive processes has been anxiety.

More information for Anxiety Disorder from Wikipedia

See also Anxiety Symptoms