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Anxiety
Everyone experiences anxiety and fear at times. It is normal and human to feel afraid and anxious at times. In fact it can be very helpful in some situations (e.g., if walking down a dark alley at night alone, an acute feeling of fear can help prepare your mind and body to see a threat coming early and react to it quickly). Anxiety mainly becomes a problem when the fears, worries and physical symptoms of anxiety, which are intended to ready us for action against real threats, become distressing, ongoing, disruptive and disconnected from actual danger, physical or psychological. At times it is not only the anxiety itself that causes problems, but the constant efforts one goes to in order to avoid experiencing anxiety. These avoidance patterns can take on a life of their own and create new problems and great disruption in one’s life.
Anxiety problems can affect individuals of all ages, and frequent, intrusive symptoms can lead to a diagnosis of an Anxiety Disorder. Psychologists are trained in working with Anxiety Disorders, and as they are a relatively common reason for seeing a psychologist, a lot is known about how to treat problematic anxiety. Anxiety Disorders include:
- Panic Disorder; panic attacks (intense symptoms of anxiety that come about very suddenly and peak quickly) that may or may not be coupled with symptoms of agoraphobia
- Agoraphobia; a persistent fear and avoidance of situations where escape or help would be difficult to access
- Specific Phobia; a strong fear of specific objects or situations, where the fear seems disproportionate to the threat itself
- Social Phobia; significant and persistent fear of social or performance situations that causes incredible discomfort
- Generalised Anxiety Disorder; constant, long-lasting, excessive and disruptive worrying about a number of different events or aspects of life
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; excessive, unreasonable, recurrent, persistent thoughts/impulses or repetitive behaviours that are time-consuming or cause marked distress or impairment
- Posttraumatic Stress Disorder; exposure to a traumatic event (i.e., it is both psychologically or physically very threatening, and is experienced as traumatic, scary or unavoidable) that results in significant life disruption (such as persistent re-experiencing of the trauma and going to great lengths to avoid reminders of the trauma).
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One person's experience
Jan lived with her husband Andrew and two teenage children, and described her life as normal and rewarding. Working as an administrative assistant for the same company for the past 8 years, Jan felt respected in her work and prided herself on doing a good job. She also liked coming home to her family, and socialising with her two close friends.
Since Andrew’s cancer scare 12 or so months ago, Jan had begun struggling with some aspects of her life. She found herself waking up increasingly early, and despite going to be earlier to try and compensate for this, she found that she would just lay in bed and think about the day just gone. “It’s like a radio in my head that I can’t turn off”, she told her therapist. “It’s on all day, but I can’t for the life of me tune it out at night especially. I lay there, thinking about the bills coming this month – even doing the calculations in my head to make sure there’s enough. We’re not rolling in cash, but we always make repayments on time…it’s as though I can’t help worrying about it. Every night, the same calculations, mentally double-checking that we’ll have enough for Christmas, for the kids’ school trips and formals…
“And it’s not just about bills. I worry about Andrew’s health. What if he got sick again? What if something happened to him? I try to imagine how I’d cope if, God forbid, I had to manage on my own. Then I get to thinking about how I’d need to work full-time again just to keep making ends meet, which would mean retraining, and I feel myself tensing up with stress. As far back as I can remember, people have told me I’m a worry wart, but it’s never been so bad. People are starting to point out at work that I seem tired, and I’ve begun making little errors – which of course keeps me up at night even more, as I replay the day and work out how I could have possibly missed that. I just want to feel a bit more peace – to not feel like there’s this worry niggling away at me quietly all day, waiting for bed time to come out in full force.”
At first, Jan really struggled with seeing a therapist. Although she could understand that anxiety wasn’t always a bad thing to have, she struggled with the concept of actually allowing herself to feel the worry even more in therapy. With time, she came to understand that she’d learned to cope with all of her anxiety by thinking about and planning for every possible scenario in her head – how she could make ends meet, what she’d do if Andrew passed away, how she could compensate for her tiredness at work so as not to have her performance suffer. Therapy therefore involved learning new ways to cope with her anxiety that didn’t leave her exhausted and wrung out by morning, such as actually inviting the anxiety in and seeing for herself if all of those worst-case scenarios came true. As therapy ended, Jan reported feeling much more at ease: “I think I’ll always be that worry wart, and there’ll always be things to stress about, though at least now I feel like that worry doesn’t run my life.”
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