Increased Anxiety Disorder occurs as a defensive reaction to stressful, aggressive external factors. However, the most sensitive people can face it, even if the situation isn’t so terrible, like losing some pennies at online casino games Canada for the first time or being late for work. Obsessive or unreasonable anxiety in children or adults significantly worsens the quality of life, and often becomes a trigger for the development of neuropsychiatric disorders.
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What Is Increased Anxiety?
Increased anxiety is a person’s high sensitivity to anxiety, to stressful life situations. The condition is more often registered in children of preschool and high school age, as well as in women with psycho-emotional instability, concomitant neurological diseases, mental childhood traumas.
A slight increase in a person’s level of stress is considered as an individual personality trait, as a peculiarity. If stress becomes compulsive, worsens the quality of life of the patient or those around him, then we speak of mental pathology. The prevalence of the disease among other affective disorders is 33%, 25% is in childhood.
Causes and Risk Factors
Anxiety disorder in a person is a tendency to excessive feelings of fear, anxiety, feelings of danger, accompanied by obsessive anticipation of threat, up to the development of panic attacks. If anxiety is justified, the person will always tell its cause, with pathology – the root cause is never identified. There are the most frequent causes of anxiety:
- Features and disorders of the nervous system of any genesis, form.
- Peculiarities of the environment, the family.
- Increased psycho-emotional stress, stress factor.
- Prior life-threatening stresses and upheavals (the person may have witnessed a tragedy, or become aware of the incident).
- Severe diseases of internal organs, associated with a persistent violation of the water-electrolyte balance, hypoxia of the brain.
- Somatic diseases.
- Hormonal failure.
- Alcoholism.
- Melancholic personality type;
- Severe trauma to the brain, meningeal infections.
The main role falls on early childhood. Anxiety can develop much later, decades later. The condition develops in the child’s unfavorable developmental environment, unstable relationships with parents. Some medications for the treatment of diabetes, some thyroid disorders, mental disorders (as a side effect) can provoke a pathological process.
Classification
Classification allows you to determine the nature of the disease, the phobia, the tactics of management of the patient. If childhood anxiety is more influenced by age chronology, in adults it is important to consider the sphere of occurrence, the degree of impact on the psyche, severity, forms:
- By impact. Clinicians distinguish mobilizing and relaxing anxiety. In the first case, the human body gets excited, prepares for danger, in the second there is a paralysis of will, a person is not able to adequately assess the degree of danger.
- Scope of emergence. Increased anxiety arises depending on the surrounding world. Educational, social, interpersonal anxiety, problem of choice are distinguished. Pathology often becomes the reason for low self-esteem, inadequate requirements for others. The usual problem of choice in any place of stay can cause stress, and there is no possibility to control emotions.
- By severity. There is low anxiety (a person underestimates even a real potential threat), optimal (anxiety in a person is accompanied by the mobilization of body resources to resist danger), increased (excitability and fear arise without reason, provoke panic, and with real danger develop hysterics, paralyzing fear).
The condition requires special attention, since both conditions pose a threat not only to a person’s psycho-emotional health, but also to his or her life, if the danger to life is real.
What Is an Anxiety Scale?
The Spielberger Anxiety Scale is a stress level, an informative method of diagnosing anxiety states for the current moment (with reactive arousal) and fluctuations in a person’s personal alertness. People with a highly anxious perception of any stress are constantly under stress, and the test will indicate the maximum score.
How and Why Signs of Anxiety Appear
Anxiety is a normal state that triggers the mechanism of self-preservation. Clinicians distinguish not only psychological disturbances during stress, but also actual physical sensations. Psychological symptoms of increased anxiety:
- Frequent worries, premonitions, insecurity.
- Disturbed sleep, decreased activity.
- Unreasonable fear for loved ones, feelings of dread, mental heaviness.
- Fear of a new environment.
- Difficulty in communicating with others.
- Decreased ability to work, impaired concentration of thoughts – the entire field of thoughts is occupied by anxiety (patients are constantly stressed, afraid of doing unnecessary things).
- Inadequate self-criticism, tearfulness.
There are other changes that occur before agitation. Physically, the disease is manifested by sweating, redness of the face and neck, rapid breathing, pulse, heartbeat. The appearance of a coma in the throat, bloating of the abdomen and thinning of stools.
Are Depression and Anxiety Related?
If the terms “increased anxiety” and “depression” are identified depression can accompany elevated levels of anxiety, as well as being a consequence of a pathological condition. Depression is often combined with most mental illnesses, complementing and aggravating mental conditions. Obsessive-compulsive anxiety can only be relieved with the help of specialists.
