Anxiety can manifest as a group of stressful feelings that include worry, fear, nervousness, apprehension, restlessness and depression.
When we react to emergencies, it is normal to alert our flight or fight impulses. In a stressful situation your heart beats faster as it supplies blood to necessary organs that get your survival reactions ready in anticipation of danger. Your palm gets sweaty and your mind races as you search for a solution to the problem. Adrenalin motivates and activates us to get things done quickly in a busy or stressed situation.
When anxiety gets out of control, it can generate a sense of dread and fear for no reason.
This can disrupt a normal life. The distress caused by acute anxiety unleashes a negative reaction in the body and mind, as the peaceful internal equilibrium is disturbed.
This can lead to reactive physical symptoms such as shortness of breath, muscle tension, trembling, headaches, dizziness, fast heartbeat, upset stomach, dry mouth and loss of sleep.
Emotional challenges can also result from the distress of too much fear. These problems include depression, irritability, inability to concentrate, and many other reactions that impact on mental health. People can suffer isolation when they don’t feel able to cope with the stressful world outside their home.
Anxiety is emotionally and mentally exhausting.
People can have harmful outcomes if they seek relief through denial and/or self medication. If someone starts to engage in the compulsive use of substances, like drugs or drinking alcohol, or engaging in risky anti-social behaviors for relief, trauma can lock down into the body further.
Rather than relieving the original pain, the body can become dependent on addictions in order to cope.
Some people go shopping in the hope that spending money on beautiful things will ease the pain, whilst others try to feel better by eating cakes and sweet foods.
Unfortunately, whether the distraction is legal or not, it doesn’t deal with the original impact of the stress and can bury the problem deeper and eventually manifest as disease later on.
If anxiety is not acknowledged and understood, the sufferer’s condition escalates and this can cause them to be trapped in a vicious cycle, one that can develop into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Witnesses to extreme trauma can have so much trouble processing a catastrophic incident that it can replay in their memory long after the initial event has passed. This causes panic attacks and fear that is triggered by seemingly innocent circumstances.
People who suffer PTSD need professional support networks as the problem is not easily rectified.
