A human's life always consists of ups and downs. Often times, we have periods of stress when something important is about to happen, be it a positive or a terrifying experience. For example, you can feel equally nervous before passing an exam and before your own wedding—anticipating what really matters to you may cause anxiety.

So, anxiety is a feeling of dread, fear, or nervousness that you experience due to expecting some future occasions or events. Sometimes you might face anxiety, too, when there is chaos, uncertainly, or lack of control. It is a natural reaction of our bodies to something that might pose a threat to our welfare. However, if this state becomes overwhelming, you notice that experience persistent negative feelings for most days over a period of six months , this might be the case you develop an anxiety disorder.

Although it might sound unserious to some, an anxiety disorder is more than just worrying, and it can significantly influence one's life—mainly negatively. The fear a person experiences during anxiety is often not proportional to the situation; on the contrary, it gets irrationally big, causing racing thoughts and interrupting daily routines. Anxiety disorder can manifest in physical symptoms, and that is when it is definitely time to seek medical help.

National Institutes of Mental Health claim that nearly 30% of the United States adult population have experienced the symptoms of anxiety disorders at least once in their lives. Since COVID-19, a lot of people around the globe started questioning their safety and fear for their future. No wonder anxiety has become so wide-spread: even in 2019, before the pandemic, anxiety disorders have been claimed as the most common mental disorders, affecting 301 million people.

However, it is good to know that there are some truly effective treatments for anxiety, and they include both psychotherapy and medications. So, to make sure you will be able to recognize anxiety, let's get to know more about it now.

Symptoms of Anxiety

The signs of anxiety disorder can appear on both emotional and physical levels. Some of them can be exposed simultaneously, interfering with a person's ability to function normally. Also, the symptoms may vary depending on the type of anxiety disorder, but generally, they are often based on nervousness and fear. However, sometimes these symptoms can be caused by emotional or physical factors, too.

Emotional Symptoms

• Feelings of worry or fear;
• a sense of danger;
• impending panic;
• uncontrollable intrusive thoughts;
• irritability;
• hard time making decisions;
• difficulty concentrating/blank mind;
• memory issues.

Some types of anxiety disorders, like panic disorder, for example, can show more emotional symptoms, which we will get back to later in the article.

If you experience any of these symptoms for a prolonged period of time, typically 6 months or more, it would be a necessary decision to talk to a mental health professional. Anxiety disorders have to be treated seriously for you to have a good quality of life. It's important to seek help as soon as these symptoms begin to interfere with your daily life; get medical help as soon as you feel the emotions of fear and dread feel paralyzing and take over you.

Physical Symptoms

Anxiety does not only affect you on a mental level; it may also interfere with how you feel physically. Although every kind of anxiety disorder has a specific body reaction, physical symptoms that may indicate anxiety anxiety include:

• Rapid heartbeat;
• sweating;
• sleeping problems (may include insomnia, bad sleeping schedule, frequent awakenings, and nightmares);
• cold limbs (caused by the reaction of sympathetic nervous system);
• shortness of breath;
• muscle tension;
• chest pain;
• nausea;
• dry mouth;
• frequent urination;
• diarrhea;
• trembling;
• getting tired rapidly and easily.

Children may develop additional symptoms like tantrums, heavy crying, or shrinking back. They also tend to cling to their parents or responsible adults, fearing to let them go. Also, in situations that cause anxiety in children, they might refuse to speak or move and freeze in one place instead. To make sure a kid feels better after a stressful event, it would be a good step to speak with a mental health provider and make sure that it was just a situational anxiety attack and not a childhood trauma with long-lasting consequences.

Common Causes of Anxiety

The factors that cause anxiety disorders are usually complex; a strong feeling of fear and worry does not always appear for one single reason. Oftentimes, biological and psychological, as well as social factors come together. Generally, we can divide them into three groups:

1. Genetic reason. Those who have relatives suffering or having suffered from anxiety before are more likely to develop anxiety symptoms during their lifetime. Besides, if there are any other mental health conditions in your family's history, you might also be at risk of getting anxiety as a disorder.
2. Medical causes. There are some conditions or habits that go hand-in-hand with anxiety disorders and may be diagnosed simultaneously.
3. Extra triggers. There might be some events that provoke anxiety symptoms.

Generally speaking, while the genetic factors are well-documented, their specific mechanisms remain a subject of ongoing research. However, the other two categories hold more information and types of phenomena that might become the reasons for anxiety disorders.

Medical Causes

Medical causes refer to biological changes in the human body that force it to expose anxiety symptoms. Some of them might be minor, yet significant, some may show a deeper level of medical disorder. They all require identification for the patient to be able to improve their physical state and find the right medications and or therapy type.

Chemical Imbalance

As anxiety is biologically based on the dysregulation of neurotransmitter system, we can claim that decreased inhibitory signalling by γ-amino-butyric-acid (GABA) or increased excitatory neurotransmission by glutamate can provoke anxiety disorders. Besides, ongoing or strong stresses influence our hormonal levels, which is why sometimes there is something within that forces us to worry and panic.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Asthma

Respiratory disorders are tightly linked to shortness of breath. When a body does not get the opportunity to breathe freely, it quickly signals that there is a threat to your life. That's why our brain automatically considers difficulty breathing a severe condition. No wonder anxiety arises so easily and accompanies respiratory disorders.

Heart Issues

This condition is especially tricky. First of all, there can be different kinds of heart problems that are connected to anxiety. Among the most wide-spread are coronary heart disease, a stroke, and cardiovascular disease. Patients with severe anxiety symptoms have a higher risk of developing heart problems, and conversely, heart issues can exacerbate anxiety symptoms. Those who are diagnosed with heart issues can feel disturbance concerning their health and, therefore, start experiencing the symptoms of anxiety disorders.

Thyroid Disease

Together with depression, anxiety is considered one of the most significant emotional symptoms of thyroid problems like hyperthyroidism. These conditions are associated so strongly that sometimes they can even get misdiagnosed. A hormonal imbalance in itself is disturbing enough, so if you start to notice the feelings in your body that have not been common for you before—for example, sweating, tremors, or heart racing—it has to be taken as a red flag and a reason to see a doctor.

Diabetes

As with other medical conditions, diabetes can cause unease and worries, which are typical for anxiety, too. A study found that people with diabetes are 20% more likely to develop anxiety than those who don't have diabetes. However, this data is only actual for America as the research was conducted in the U.S.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

Being the most common functional gastrointestinal disorder, IBS can greatly influence one's daily routine. Having to manage the habits connected with IBS, a person can experience quite a strong worry regarding intestinal motility.

Withdrawal From Alcohol or Medications

Anxiety and depression make a pair of diagnoses often associated with a withdrawal syndrome that sometimes happens when a person stops taking medication. It is also common for cases when a person decides to stop alcohol intake after a long time of using.

Withdrawal from anti-anxiety medications (like benzodiazepines) can have the same effect, too, both on a biological and psychological level. If one took some medications regularly, especially if it was part of a mental condition therapy, it might cause extra worry to give up on this support and stop relying on remedies.

Excessive alcohol and drug intake may cause anxiety attacks, too, which can be a worrying symptom. However, it does not necessarily grow into a disorder. Also, some medications can sometimes have anxiety as a side effect to them. If you notice that some remedies that you take start to influence you in this way, it is a necessity to speak to your doctor as soon as possible to either change the medication or control your intake.

Who Is at Risk?

There can be several reasons that provoke anxiety symptoms besides the medical or genetic ones. Some of them are environmental, like life events that happen regardless of your will or attempts to control them. Or, these can be just some factors that, too, do not directly depend on us. Let's see what risk factors are considered likely to trigger anxiety disorders.

1. Trauma or PTSD. People who have gone through traumatic events have a higher likelihood of experiencing intense fear, panic attacks, or other anxiety symptoms that negatively affect their mental health and overall well-being. Traumatic experiences, especially when unresolved, can lead to chronic anxiety symptoms and, in some cases, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
2. Personality. There are some combinations of character traits that make a person tend to certain types of reactions. They appear more prone to anxiety disorders, and this is often influenced by innate tendencies or early life experiences. Surely, if you have always had some self-doubt or had been shy as a kid, it would be harder for you to control anxiety when you grow up.
3. Accumulated stress. Chronic stress can dysregulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which plays a role in anxiety responses. If there have been some really hard times in your life, including really stressful events like the loss of someone dear, major work issues, or anything else that has a strong negative effect on your nervous system, there is a higher chance for you to develop a mental disorder like anxiety. Moreover, even when minor sad or stressful events happen regularly for a long period of time, they may also bring excessive worry, growing fear, rapid heartbeat, and other symptoms of anxiety.

Types of Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety disorders are numerous in type, and it is good to be able to recognize them. Not only does it help you understand what the triggers can be and therefore eliminate them faster, but also this knowledge can come in handy when somebody else with anxiety symptoms needs help. Here are some of the most wide-spread ones that people might interfere with or experience themselves.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

This is a diagnosis that most anxious patients get first. GAD is an excessive and persistent worry about daily deeds or events, which significantly lowers the life quality of a patient and does not let them function normally. It is a feeling of less to no control over your own life that lasts for six months or more and appears more days than not. Generally, it is a feeling or worry about how you are going to get through the day, an indefinite fear about the near future. The main challenge about it is that the patient doesn't know how to stop this endless cycle of intrusive thoughts.

GAD is associated with physical symptoms like muscle tension, fatigue, or sleep disturbances.

Social Anxiety Disorder

A social anxiety disorder, or social phobia, is a fear of being negatively evaluated by others. For people with this diagnosis, social interactions are usually accompanied by feelings of fear, humiliation, and embarrassment, often accompanied by physical symptoms such as blushing, sweating, trembling, or a rapid heartbeat.. Social anxiety is more commonly diagnosed in females and adolescents, and typically manifests between the ages of 8 and 15. Just like GAD, social anxiety is considered a disorder if it lasts persistently for at least six months.

Panic Disorder

This type of anxiety is vastly different from other anxiety disorders: it is characterized by sudden and severe feeling of terror when no real danger exists; situations like this are called panic attacks and are a bright example of how panic disorder works. A person with this diagnosis can feel detached from reality, feel like they are going crazy, have shortness of breath, or have a strong fear of sudden death. These attacks often start unexpectedly, and it is not always possible to understand what the triggers are. Hence, fear of panic attacks becomes another common symptom of a panic disorder.

However, sometimes patients can predict a panic disorder by certain symptoms, but they usually differ from person to person.

A panic disorder may foster other anxiety disorders, like agoraphobia, because of the hardship of social interactions and going out in public.

According to the statistics, women are twice as likely to develop panic disorder symptoms as men.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

OCD is characterized by a strong cycle of obsessions and intrusive thoughts that make it impossible to function normally on a daily basis. It involves persistent, intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) performed to alleviate distress regarding a certain action, situation, or area of life. People with OCD usually start to develop the symptoms between the ages of 8 and 12. However, the signs may appear later, in late teenage years or in early adulthood.

It is vital to remember that not every compulsion or obsession turns into OCD. An Obsessive Compulsive Disorder possesses some special features you can recognize it by:

• experiencing disruptions to daily activities because of the compulsion/obsession;
• spending not less than one hour on compulsion/obsession;
• getting no pleasure from the compulsive/obsessive activity;
• feeling of relief when getting a chance to perform compulsive/obsessive activity;
• little to no control over conscious compulsive/obsessive activity & inability to stop.

Obsessive hand washing can be a bright example of OCD when a person can even get hurt by constantly rubbing their hands with soap and towels.

Phobias

Phobias are excessive fears of objects, events or phenomena that influence the patient's daily life. This fear does not correspond to reality and is usually accompanied by unique behavior. Sometimes the phobias get so strong that they become disruptive for one's work, relationship, trips, or any other kind of plans and routines. Physical manifestations of phobias can include an increased pulse and sweating.

Among the most common phobias are agoraphobia (a fear and/or avoidance of situations that might cause panic, feeling trapped or helpless, like open spaces or public transport), hemophobia (a fear of blood), trypanophobia (a fear of needles), and arachnophobia (a fear of spiders).

Separation Anxiety Disorder

This intense fear or worry about separating from loved ones is common for both adults and children. Although it may seem natural for kids to strongly cling to their parents or caregivers, the severity of this condition might interfere with their lives. Moreover, adults can develop this fear, too, especially if there has been some stressful event that endangered someone's life or family's unity. This might lead to avoidance problem.

The physical symptoms usually are headache and nausea.

Seemingly non-serious, this disorder can disrupt one's work or worsen personal relationships just like any other anxiety condition, as it can be treated by other people not as worry and care but as mistrust and, therefore, taken as an insult.

When Anxiety Becomes a Disorder

Anxiety is usually considered a medical condition qualified as a disorder when the symptoms exposed are severe and last longer than six months. If you notice that you can't help yourself and need to be taken care of, the best decision would be to meet a medical specialist who can diagnose and relieve anxiety.

To make sure that it is a mental illness and not just overthinking, you have to pass a few stages of diagnostics:

1. Self-assessment questionnaire. You can take one online: many resources offer different sets of questions that help to estimate your condition and see if you need medical treatment. Medical specialists often use the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) by the American Psychiatric Association to see if they match your state. However, it can't be taken as the only method of diagnostics; it is always necessary to gain more information and run other tests to stay objective.
2. Medical history. A doctor needs to collect information about all the medical conditions you have experienced or are currently experiencing. Why is it important? Because as you already know, anxiety can be linked to many other medical conditions. Some may just accompany anxiety, and some may be the reason it appears. Besides, to choose the most effective and safe therapy, your doctor has to be aware of your illnesses to guarantee your welfare as much as it is possible.
3. Physical examination. You will have to run different checks, including blood tests, to estimate your health and see if there can be any biological reasons for anxiety or diagnosis that have not been discovered before that may influence the anxiety issue, too.

As for the diagnostic tests, there are several kinds of them that can be implied. It depends on a medical specialist which one they choose. They mainly differ in length and structure, and, of course, the scientists who created these methods used slightly different approaches to identifying anxiety and its type. So, here are the tests that typically help to diagnose mental health issues like anxiety disorder:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale. Consists of 7 questions regarding the latest feelings and conditions during the last 2 weeks. The answer options are: "not at all," "several days," "more than half of the days," and "nearly every day."
• Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAM-A). Consists of 14 questions and rates behavioral, mental, and physical traits. It is used to identify moods and fears and to measure the tension a person is experiencing.
• Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale. Consists of 20 questions about the feelings of nervousness, fear and their physical symptoms like sharing, frequent urination, sweating, rapid heartbeat, and other.
• Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). Consists of 21 questions to measure the severity of anxiety. The answers are multiple-choice type and concern the symptoms a patient has experienced during the past week.
• Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Consists of 16 questions and is used to estimate the patient's worry, as one can guess from the name. This test is run to see how excessive, uncontrollable, and generalized worry is.
• Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN). Consists of 17 questions about how anxious a person feels in social situations. It is a decent self-assessment tool to identify social phobia.
• Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS). This test is rather different from all the above as it is a one-on-one interview with a medical specialist. A patient is exposed to a list of symptoms, where they have to choose the main three that they have been bothered with during the past week. Then, the patient estimates those symptoms' severity, and after a talk that also includes questions about compulsions or obsessions that they might have had in the past, the doctor can present a diagnosis of OCD and its degree: subclinical, mild, moderate, severe, or extreme.

All tests, except for YBOCS, can be conducted online, but they all have to be interpreted by medical specialists. Your doctors needs to take into account your medical history and clinical assessment to ensure prescribing correct treatment.

Impact of Anxiety on Daily Life

Anxiety disorder may interfere with daily life greatly, making its quality lower day after day if no treatment is applied.

Work and professional success are one of the spheres that suffer first when one develops the symptoms of excessive worry and fears. People with anxiety disorders have hardship finishing their tasks, asking for help, receiving and processing feedback, and other related challenges. It gets much harder for them to evaluate their work adequately or even start doing some tasks because of a low level of self-confidence. This way, it gets very easy for anxiety to take control over one's job and even make a person lose it.

Talking of personal relationships, they can suffer a lot, too. In fact, your partner is usually the first to notice some changes in your behavior if your interaction is close and frequent enough. To the couples that live together, anxiety can become truly implacable. For example, a constant and strong fear of conflict or breakup may add negativity to daily interactions if one of the partners is concentrated on the possible negative outcome, which makes the whole communication process worrying and exhausting. Moreover, if one of the partners is always second-guessing their relationship, chances are it will suffer or even end.

Physical health is another sphere of daily life that is significantly impacted by anxiety disorders. We have already talked about all the symptoms a person with the disorders may experience, and they are already bad enough to say that constant worrying brings you no good. However, we must remember that overall exhaustion is a constant companion to anybody with anxiety. The body gets to live through too much tension, both physical and emotional, and it brings great tiredness. Besides, a patient may develop some chronic illnesses caused by stress, or the already existing health issues can get worse. It is quite ironic, really, because a person with anxiety often has an extreme fear about their physical condition, and anxiety might be the reason they get more problems.

It all, again, brings us to the idea that anxiety disorders can seriously influence our lives in many aspects, and they require medical treatment.

Conclusion

Anxiety is a medical condition that can have a great impact on our physical and mental well-being, as well as on many areas of our lives, like relationships, professional growth, and personal development. Sometimes, it can be hard to notice because not every person can tell if their normal reaction of fear of the actual danger turns into an unrealistic worry and excessive anxiety. Luckily, anxiety is treatable, like other mental disorders and physical health conditions.

To make sure you take good care of your health, don't hesitate to consult a doctor if you suspect having anxiety, and don't be scared to ask for help when the anxiety symptoms get overwhelming. You can pass online tests to previously measure the severity of your state or turn to self-helping techniques that can become your first step on the way to welfare.