Anxiety Disorder

Even if many normal life situations are likely to cause anxiety, only when worrying becomes pervading can specialists diagnose a nervous disorder. By anxiety disorder, specialists refer to a number of nervous ailments that are characterized by the appearance of sudden panic attacks and the constant discomfort of something lurking out there, threateningly. Even if anxiety attacks are not a threat from a sheer biological point of view, they are very harmful if we consider the terror and what it can do to one’s psyche. Most of the time, people who get to develop an anxiety disorder have in fact suffered from repeated panic attacks that caused a disabling condition eventually.

An anxiety disorder will most frequently develop on the background of a hereditary predisposition to irritant factors from the environment. The panic attack appears only when such an individual becomes exposed to an external stressing element that is normally facilitated by traumatic events, extended stress, medical procedure or the use of drugs or prescription medication. This means that chances are a lot higher for a panic attack to appear in a person who has gone through some very tough experience.

Does a panic attack equal an anxiety disorder? Well, the first terrifying experience with all its symptoms, creates a sensitivity at the level of the central nervous system. Once such an event marks one’s life, the person becomes more sensitive to external threats. The fear that a panic attack is about to strike you, may actually cause a real anxiety bout even if the initial symptoms you identified were not related to the episode. Even if there is no external threat to justify the appearance of panic episodes, the person often starts fearing the anxiety symptoms as such and gives them rather catastrophic proportions.

Behavioral and cognitive therapies provide the best treatments for anxiety disorder cases. The use of antidepressants or tranquilizers is just a temporary relief method and should not be used for long periods of time. In fact, such medication can only be administered only under close medical monitoring. If other therapy forms are not used in parallel with drug administration, symptoms may very well return when the treatment is over and the anxiety disorder could thus progress to more severe forms.

Filed Under: Anxiety