What is Anxiety?

At some point in our lives, most people experience stress or anxiety. Stress or anxiety can sometimes be a short-term response to a stimulus, such as exams, deadlines, or interviews. However, when the feeling of stress or anxiety is consistent for a longer period of time, without any external triggers, it is better described as anxiety. This anxiety can sometimes develop into a type of anxiety disorder, which can significantly affect your daily life.

Why am I feeling like this?

The causes of anxious feelings, fear or panic are different for everyone. When you’re anxious, your body releases stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. These are important in some situations to prepare your body for pain and stress, but they can also cause an increase in heart rate, sweating and, in some people, a panic attack.

These disorders or symptoms can develop after tough life events, such as

the death of someone close to us
moving houses or schools often
exam stress or bullying
parents fighting or arguing
issues in marriage or romantic relationships.

Some causes can be genetic or due to predisposing issues, such as a history of drug or alcohol misuse or having a painful long-term health condition.

Do I have an anxiety disorder or do I feel anxious?

Feeling anxious is often a threatening response to a triggering event that can group other emotions such as stress, worry and tension. Although feeling anxious and having anxiety are different things, the feelings are the same. If you are having anxious feelings over a long period (for six months or more), your anxiety is disproportionate to the situation, and it’s stopping you from living your daily life, you may have an anxiety disorder.

Some commonly diagnosed anxiety disorders are:

Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD): GAD is a long-term condition that causes people to feel anxious most days and can struggle to remember the last time they felt relaxed. It can often feel like even when one worrying situation has passed, there’s always another that will cause anxiety. More symptoms that may be present are restlessness, fatigue, impaired concentration and irritability.

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD): SAD is the constant fear in social situations or where people will have to perform in front of people where the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or judgement. When people are put in these situations, they will often feel anxious and can have panic attacks. The feelings can often lead the person to avoid these situations, affecting their everyday life.

Panic disorder: A panic disorder describes having regular, random panic attacks and constantly fearing that there will be more. This can lead to avoiding situations and changing behaviours that may induce an attack.

Phobias: A specific phobia is an intense and irrational fear of a particular object or situation that causes a person a lot of distress. It can significantly impact their school, work or home life because people this phobia causes people to avoid these situations.

Health anxiety: Health anxiety can sometimes be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder and happens when people spend much time worrying that they’re ill or going to get ill. Some signs of health anxiety can be worrying that a doctor or medical tests may have missed something, frequently checking your body for signs of illness, and avoiding anything to do with serious illness, such as medical TV programmes.

What is a panic attack?

Panic attacks often build up very quickly, and you can feel your heart pounding, very hot or very cold, feel sick, struggling to breathe, or your legs shaking or turning to jelly. These are really scary when they happen, and you might feel like you’re having a heart attack or that you’re losing control or going to die.

Panic attacks can happen at any point. For you, they may happen once and never again, and for some, they may have them regularly at any point of the day or only in certain situations. A panic attack can last anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes, but there are some techniques that can help.

Focus on your breathing. You could try to breathe slowly and count from one to five with each breath.
Sensory distraction: Some people find cuddling something soft like a pillow or a soft toy helps, and some people find chewing gum or something with a strong, fresh taste can help ground them.
Grounding techniques: One example of grounding techniques is a five-step psychological, sensory grounding technique, which helps you to focus on different sensations to calm down.