What is anxiety?

Events and circumstances appear in everyone's daily life that can make the person feel nervous, pressured or even threatened. Before these stressful stimuli, the individual must react through a proportionate response and adapt to the new circumstance. When the person is not able to react proportionately and the stressful stimulus exceeds their ability to adapt, anxiety appears.

It usually manifests as a disproportionate response to threats or "stressful" events of everyday life. The patient usually feels permanently threatened, so that his physiological alert system remains activated for a long time, as if his life were in danger because of a threat and it did not stop. Thus, the person with anxiety manifests the symptoms of response to threats in a chronic and disproportionate way, to stimuli that are not threatening.

How is it produced?

Various theories try to explain chronic anxiety, and probably all of them contain a part of reality:

• Anxiety may appear for a conflict between what is desired and what is dictated by conscience what is the best; Faced with the contradiction of wishes and convictions, an anxiety reaction appears;
• Anxiety is a learned reaction: When a person reacts anxiously to a certain stimulus, with high probability they will react anxiously to the repetition of the stimulus.

Symptoms

Faced with a threat, the rphysiological response of the organism is to start biochemical reactions that prepare the body for a reaction of attack-defense or flight of the imminent threat. In the anxiety reaction, these same mechanisms are disproportionately activated, in the face of a threat that is not such or that is much less intense or dangerous. Anxiety has two types of signs and symptoms:

Physical symptoms

• Tachycardia
• Sweating
• Shaking
• Dyspnoea
• muscle tension
• Crisis of anguish
• Hyperventilation
• Sometimes chest pain and a feeling of suffocation

Psychological symptoms

• Obsessing over recurring thoughts about the stressful stimulus, ongoing and recurring thoughts about serious illness or impending danger
• Chronic alertness to possible dangers
• Inattention to stimuli that previously interested you
• Difficulty concentrating on matters other than dangers.

Diagnosing an anxiety disorder

The anxiety picture has an eminently clinical diagnosis, through the interview and evaluation of symptoms presented by the patient. Anxiety disorders can manifest themselves in many different ways, the most frequent being:

• Acute stress disorder: Faced with stressful stimuli, the patient can promptly trigger an excessive reaction.
• Medical illness anxiety disorder: Faced with a real or hypothetical serious illness, the patient may react in an excessively anxious way, has an excessive fear of suffering from a certain disease (cancerophobia).
• Post-traumatic stress disorder: after a truly traumatic event that has endangered the life of the patient or that has produced in him a reaction of great anxiety, the patient can re-relive or mentally experience the event through images or stimuli associated with the initial trauma.
• Substance-Induced Anxiety Disorder: the anxiety crisis happens as an undesirable effect of some specific drug or substance.
• Specific phobias: the patient triggers an anxiety reaction to certain stimuli such as objects, people, animals or situations.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder: the patient suffers from fears and obsessions of such intensity that they interfere with his normal life. For example, the patient must do or check over and over again what he is doing.
• Generalized anxiety disorderPatients are indefinitely fearful and overly concerned, they present excessive and unrealistic fears in all normal life situations, without focusing their fears in the face of any specific stimulus.
• Unspecified anxiety disorder: the anxiety reaction does not have a certain or known origin.

Some medical illnesses may manifest symptoms similar to anxiety states, and it may be necessary to rule them out as the origin of the disorder.

Treatment for anxiety

The treatment of chronic anxiety must be approached mainly from two aspects:

• Psychotherapy or psychological approach: The patient generally improves by being able to discuss their concerns freely before a person with medical or psychotherapeutic knowledge. Relaxation techniques, behavior therapy, and other types of psychotherapy or psychiatric approach are also effective.
• Pharmacotherapy: through drugs that reduce excessive anxiety response or improve the balance of brain neurotransmitters. The pharmacological approach can be very effective, although in many cases it may not be necessary when dealing with mild conditions.

Precautionary measures

Any measure or activity that can lead to an increase in the person's self-confidence or that helps to face daily problems with greater confidence will be a effective measure to prevent the appearance of a picture of anxiety.

Thus, it can be of great help to carry out physical exercise, adequate sleep, maintaining a proper diet Y avoid stimulant substances, as well as having adequate preparation to face professional and daily life challenges in order to resolve conflicts without tension or respond to daily problems with determination, integrity and objectivity.