Anxiety is a normal feeling people experience when faced with threat, danger or stress.  Feeling anxious can sometimes be a good thing.  Anxiety can actually help you by motivating you to prepare for a big test or by keeping you on your toes in potentially dangerous situations.  In fact, it's very important to realise that one should never be seeking a cure for anxiety, as in the total elimination of anxiety from your life.  You need anxiety to equip you to get out of the way of real and present danger, to motivate you to do your best in school, work and sporting events. The emphasis in Calming Words is on providing you with ways to manage your anxiety so that you can accept and even welcome the arrival of your anxiety symptoms - the appropriate ones that arrive when a car is heading straight for you, and the inappropriate ones.

Occasional anxiety is part of normal life.  For some people anxiety is a constant factor in their lives. When a person has anxiety problems, it interferes with their ability to function normally on a daily basis. Anxiety problems can cause teens to suffer from intense, long-lasting fear or worry, in addition to other symptoms.

Understanding Anxiety

Problems with too-high a level of anxiety involving unrealistic fear and worry are very common.  It is estimated that that they affect about 16% to 20% of the U.S. population including people of all ages, races and backgrounds with one exception.  Women tend to be more likely to have problems with anxiety than men.  Either that, or as with all areas of health, they report their issues more than men.

Anxiety is the automatic physiological  physical changes that occur in response to perceived threat or danger. On awareness of a danger, the involuntary nervous system sends immediate messages throughout our body, to either ‘fight’ (tackle the situation head on) or ‘flight’ (flee from the situation). This ‘fight or flight’ response is characterised by:

• Alert mind

• Increased heart rate & blood pressure

• Increased breathing rate

• A feeling of fear or apprehension

• Trembling, shaking or a feeling of restlessness

• Feeling cold, clammy, chills or hot flushes

• Feeling nauseous or butterflies in the stomach

The anxiety response can be very useful in the short term to deal with dangerous or stressful situations. However, if this reaction does not subside when the threat passes, or is exaggerated, it can be counterproductive and disabling to the individual.

The experience of having problems with anxiety has a significant impact on a person’s life including:

• Feeling constantly wound up and ‘on edge’

• Feeling irritable

• Feeling physically unwell

• Difficulty concentrating & making decisions

• Difficulty with relaxing or sleep routine

• Constant worrying and unable to ‘switching off’ unpleasant thoughts

• Difficulty going out, mixing with people

• Having negative outlook on yourself & the future

Are you an overly anxious parent?

Being a parent can provide everyone with legitimate moments of worry and even high anxiety.  If your child has a high fever, you'd have to be made of concrete not to be anxious, fearful and a bit worried.  Many first time parents err on the side of caution with their very young children whose temperature is often due to something as unthreatening and natural as teething.  It's a balancing act.  If you've raced your two year old to the Emergency Room at the local hospital with a high fever, which immediately dissipates after one dose of paracetamol or aspirin, no one would immediately diagnose you as overly anxious.  If from other symptoms you know that that child is cutting her or his two year old molars and likely to run a fever, then taking that child to the ER with every fever spike ( before administering an aspirin and waiting half an hour, to see if the fever eases) that's perhaps an indicator that you're overly anxious.  So what?  With young children, it's better to be sure than sorry.  Right?  Yes.  And no.  Those of you reading this will know that the panicky reactions you had to the two year old's temperature spikes  have never really left.

You've never, ever, been able to get to sleep until your twenty-two year old came home from that party.  You worry excessively if your nineteen year old daughter is even half an hour late.  You constantly nag (or try to motivate) your adult children about their University assignments.  Your adult children keep many things secret from you because they know your reaction will be an over-the-top show of concern.  You spend far too many hours worrying and fear-filled about your children's latest partner: none of whom is ever good enough. 

A parent with generalised anxiety is very likely instead to transmit worry and anxiety to his or her children.  For instance, even young adults still living at home with a mother who is highly anxious, can come home at 1am to find their terrified mother sitting up waiting for them.  Given the adult status of the son or daughter, there will be no reprimands, but the parent will have sent strong signals of anxiety about her offspring.  And of course that will not be the first time.  In fact, that sort of excessive fear and concern will have been a pattern throughout the childhood and adolescence of the anxious mother’s children.  It is normal for parents to worry about their children when they first learn to drive, and it's even more normal to worry when children don’t come home at an expected time.  What I'm referring to here is once again, a matter of degree.  When a parent is actually becoming so distressed about an adult child being late that s/he is almost vomiting or getting diarrhoea, then those symptoms of anxiety have become dysfunctional.

General indicators that you might have anxiety problems

If you're someone who can never earn enough or have enough, to relax about it and to enjoy spending it, you may have underlying anxiety problems that you haven't had to face, or you haven't wanted to face.  If opportunities to travel become reasons for days or weeks of anxiety-induced diarrhoea, while you worry about packing, not packing; getting to the airport on time; finding the right terminal; getting lost in a foreign airport, driving in a foreign country, then it might be a good idea to look at other areas of your life.  Not so that you can find a label to put on your behaviour, but so that you can face your problems as the first step to managing them.  Why?  Because chances are that if you worry excessively about something as everyday as money or as unusual as travel, you may see that you spend a great deal of your day, every day, worrying about other things. 

You probably also worry unduly about your job performance, and you're far too concerned about running late for appointments and about your contribution to work meetings. Your anxiety switch is turned up way too high.  Your anxiety level is excessive to a point where your quiet enjoyment of life is being seriously impaired.  Forget about whether or not you’re ill, your life is so filled with unhappy fear-filled feelings that you’ve forgotten how to feel joy and happiness.  Your birthright."

A person who has problem levels of anxiety, tends to worry.  Worry is their middle name.

They predict the worst about everything

They worry, and sometimes feel intense levels of fear, about big and little issues.  That anxiety manifests itself as uncomfortable physical symptoms throughout the day.  Although that person may have days, even weeks, without feeling proportionately too much fear and anxiety about life, it will only take being invited to address a meeting at work, or represent their political party at a debate for the roof of their world to cave in.  Sometimes, the person with what I term background anxiety (anxiety that doesn't manifest itself as debilitating attacks of panic, but stays in the background of your life), sometimes that person has had much more serious episodes of anxiety attacks and panic attacks in their adolescence or early twenties.  Once they escaped from those attacks as many people do just by a process of maturation, they regard the less severe anxiety as perfectly normal.  It's not.

Generalised anxiety refers to a level of concern and worry that has become dysfunctional rather than helpful in your day-to-day life.  As I mention throughout Calming Words, anxiety is a very important part of our lives.  Without it, we would not get up in the morning in time for work, we wouldn’t study for exams, train hard for the Olympics, and nor would we make an effort to escape real and present danger. 

In other words, if your plane leaves at 6pm and you have to be at the airport at 4pm, then you need to be there at 4pm.  Making sure that you get there by 3pm or even 3.30pm can place a lot of extra strain on you, your family, and friends.  Your normal, functional and helpful anxiety which works with you to get you there on time, has gone over the top.  Given that you may not travel a lot, that sort of highly anxious approach may be understandable, and it’s not likely to affect your life too much.

However, it is likely that the same person who stresses out about being on time – to the point where he or she is obsessively early – that person will also always, or usually, think the worst when their relatives or friends are late, or ill. 

Generalised anxiety is not just about being pessimistic, though that is a component of this type of anxiety.  It is more that in every single sphere of life, the person worries, feels ill at ease, and yes, just plain anxious.  The alternative – that of feeling positive and joy-filled is a state that s/he rarely feels. 

Seeking help with your anxiety problem

Many people with generalised anxiety do not seek help for their anxiety because they put it down to “that’s just the way I am.  I’m a worry wart”.  That sort of generalised anxiety is perhaps more difficult to diagnose and treat than something like a panic attack.  The panic attack is so intrusive into your life, and makes life so obviously unpleasant and difficult that people do reach out to seek help. 

In the case of people who have generalised anxiety, they live a life of quiet desperation and profound unhappiness.  Rarely do they just relax and enjoy, or even recognise, the blessings they have in their lives.  A great deal of their time is spent criticising work colleagues and even family and friends – often seen as the cause of their anxieties.  Because they rarely breathe in joy themselves, they are not as capable of transmitting sheer pleasure and joy in being alive to those around them.   

Although it is always difficult to define what is a natural and normal level of concern about work, study, family, finances and the state of the world, it is such a waste of the great and finite gift of life, to spend so much of it in a negative, fear-filled, state.  And usually, there is no good and rational reason for feeling that fear.

How often have you heard the expression:

“Everything’s a drama to her”?

In all likelihood, that drama queen is a highly anxious person. 

The anxiety and worry has led to the person experiencing at least three of the symptoms listed below.

Cardiovascular System   

Rapid heartbeat 

Palpitations, and an uncomfortable awareness of the heart rate

Hyperventilation symptoms caused by rapid, shallow, breathing

Cold fingers

Musculoskeletal System 

Muscles tension and pain

Involuntary trembling of the body, or parts of the body, eg the mouth

Other aches and pains

Central Nervous System

Feeling apprehensive, aroused and vigilant

Poor concentration – sometimes related to being fatigued due to sleep disturbance

Feeling "on edge," impatient, or irritable, also related to fatigue

Insomnia

Sleep disturbance

Fatigue  

Tension headaches

Genitourinary System

Need for frequent urination

Difficulty becoming sexually aroused or achieving orgasm (women)

Difficulty maintaining an erection

Gastrointestinal System

Dry mouth

Difficulty swallowing, and in some cases, a fear that others notice that difficulty

"Butterflies" in the stomach

Gurgling sounds of gas in the intestines

Colon spasms

Nausea and vomiting or dry retching

Diarrhoea and/or constipation

Anxiety in children and adolescents

Problems with a too-high level anxiety can start in childhood with children and adolescents worrying to a greater extent than their peers about school performance, sporting prowess, their appearance and their popularity.  Once again, if the child has grown up with overly anxious parents, the tendency will be exacerbated.  Even quite laid back, relaxed, children can become tense and anxious adolescents if their parents transmit their own fears and anxieties about their performance to their children on a regular basis. 

Children who are growing up in a fairly relaxed family atmosphere can simply come across as ideal students, and parents may even be counting their blessings that their son or daughter does her/his home work without being nagged about it.  The highly anxious child will be a perfectionist and s/he will require an excessive amount of reassurance about their performance.  Although we all love our children to come home with an A grade, it is vital to watch for signs of anxiety accompanying their school work.  A child who frets and even cries about an assignment in elementary (primary) school, cannot automatically be diagnosed as having generalised anxiety or indeed, any anxiety problems.  However, it is good for parents to monitor those sorts of reactions.  Children and adolescents with generalised anxiety may also worry about being punctual, their appearance, or impending catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, meteors flying to Earth and nuclear war.

Useful Websites for Information about Anxiety

Anxiety Fear
The term Anxiety refers to the complex set of negative emotions, which include fear, apprehension and worry. Anxiety is often accompanied by physical sensations such as palpitations, nausea, chest pain and / or shortness of breath.

Anxiety Treatment Australia
 Information on anxiety disorders, panic attacks, phobias, stress management, insomnia, chronic pain and anxiety  and more, psychologists across Australia who treat anxiety

Anxiety and Panic Attack Info Centre
Relevant content on anxiety and panic attacks.