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This page offers you some information about anxiety. You or someone you know might be experiencing anxiety for the first time, or maybe you’ve lived with it forever. Whatever your circumstances, this article will help you to understand more about this fundamentally human experience.
Some physical health problems can cause symptoms that look and feel like anxiety. For this reason, it is important to see a GP if you are experiencing physical symptoms.
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is a whole body-mind experience. Most of us experience it at one time or another, it is very common, and can be intensely distressing. It can have many different causes, ranging from past experiences to current circumstances, or both. Therapy can help reduce symptoms as well as explore the underlying causes.
When we experience the symptoms of anxiety, it means that our body has activated its threat response: our body is gearing itself up to fight something or to run away from it. That’s why people talk about the fight/flight system. A part of the brain senses danger, and sets in motion a series of bodily processes. Adrenaline and cortisol are released, because if we are in danger, these hormones will help us to be more alert, run faster or fight harder. To get the hormones where they need to go, we need to take in more oxygen. We achieve this by breathing faster, which raises our heart rate, so our blood moves faster and carries the hormones around our body. Our digestion shuts down, which is why we get butterflies in our stomach, need to use the loo or we feel sick. If we feel really panicky, our thinking also closes down, because our body is in emergency mode. All of these co-occurring processes happen outside our awareness, our body does it all automatically.
We would never want to lose this vital protective system. We need to be able to respond quickly if we are in danger. The problem occurs when we are feeling the effects of our threat response but there is no danger present. This is what is happening when we feel anxious.
Two of the most important things we talk about in the early stages of therapy for anxiety are understanding anxiety (‘psycho-education’) and self-care. This is because, although there are medications for anxiety, the symptoms can reduce considerably when people take action to manage it. Understanding anxiety means you can tell yourself “I understand what is happening in my body, I am ok” rather than “I’m going to have a heart attack and die” (which is likely to increase your anxiety). Most people are able to reduce the severity of their symptoms by increasing their self-care.
Find out more about symptoms and see if any of it sounds familiar.
Have a look at the self-care page for some ideas of things to do which might help.
