A sophisticated combination of negative, anxious emotions, which includes fear, worrying and fear of consequences. Anxiety is often accompanied by physical symptoms or sensations like a racing heart, breathlessness, nausea, chest pains and sweating for example.
Having GAD means that the sufferer is always anticipating a negative outcome to everything they confront, sufferers often worry inappropriately about health, finances, relationships or their career.
The normal reaction to anxiety is to retreat or withdraw from ‘normal’ activities, this reinforces to the anxious mind that it is OK for our anxiety to dictate to us and for us to modify our enjoyment of life to accommodate it… this is not acceptable.
GAD is an anxiety disorder because, as already stated, without an underlying anxiety disorder, GAD cannot be present.
GAD sufferers have inappropriate and sometimes scary disturbing thoughts, sometimes violent or sexual in nature – these may sometimes involve people with whom they would never partake in such acts, even members of their own family. On occasion, simply the thought of getting through the day provokes anxiety as soon as the sufferer wakes.
Because adrenaline levels are artificially raised through stressors, which ultimately leads to a resetting of our baseline anxiety level, we can experience general or generalized anxiety.
This means that the body is functioning at a much higher level of anxiety, causing a whole list of anxious feelings, emotions and sensations.
What are the symptoms of GAD?
GAD sufferers may often feel light-headed or out of breath. They may also feel nauseated or have to go to the bathroom frequently. Generalized anxiety is constant and can cause anxiety / panic attacks during the day and night. Night time anxiety and panic attacks are especially disturbing and can often wake the sufferer from deep sleep feeling particularly frightened. Night time anxiety can be minimized with some practical steps which minimize the impact of such things as blood sugar level fluctuations during sleep.
This doesn’t mean you should rush to your doctor to get anxiety medication – in fact, quite the contrary!
Anxiety is often misdiagnosed as depression by physicians, who’s ‘knee jerk’ reaction is to reach for the prescription pad, not only is this premature but wholly inappropriate treatment for an anxiety condition. Anxiety isn’t caused by a mental or physical illness and certainly not by a chemical imbalance which requires medicinal ‘correction’… anxiety disorder is a behavioral condition and can not be eliminated by adding chemicals to the blood stream.