Anxiety is an uncomfortable feeling of fear or imminent disaster and is a normal emotional response to danger. However, when anxiety is present, and there is no real danger, it can be classified as dysfunctional. While everyone feels anxious from time to time, some people experience these feelings so often and/or so strongly that it can affect their everyday lives.

Often people confuse anxiety disorders with stress. Stress is a normal reaction to a situation where a person feels under pressure. For example, it’s common for people to feel stressed or uptight when meeting work deadlines, sitting exams or speaking in front of a group of people.

Stress can be highly adaptive because it gives you the energy and drive to fulfil your task. However, when these feelings are ongoing, happen for no apparent reason or continue after the stressful event has passed, they become maladaptive. Untreated or unrecognised anxiety disorders can lead to secondary conditions such as agoraphobia, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, or tragically in some cases, suicide.

Symptoms

Anxiety can be accompanied by physical effects such as heart palpitations, fatigue, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath, stomach aches, or headaches. Physically, the body prepares the organism to deal with a threat. Blood pressure and heart rate are increased, sweating is increased, bloodflow to the major muscle groups is increased, and immune and digestive system functions are inhibited (the fight or flight response). External signs of anxiety may include pale skin, sweating, trembling, and pupillary dilation. Someone suffering from anxiety might also experience it as a sense of dread or panic.

Although every anxiety sufferer does not experience panic attacks, they are a common symptom. Panic attacks usually come without warning, and although the fear is generally irrational, the perception of danger is very real. A person experiencing a panic attack will often feel as if he or she is about to die or pass out. Panic attacks may be confused with heart attacks.

Anxiety does not only consist of physical symptoms. There are many emotional symptoms involved as well. Some of them include: Feelings of apprehension or dread, trouble concentrating, feeling tense or jumpy, anticipating the worst, irritability, restlessness, watching (and waiting) for signs (and occurrences) or danger, and, feeling like your mind’s gone blank. There’s also nightmares and bad dreams, obsessions about sensations, deja vu, a trapped in your mind feeling, and feeling like everything is scary.

One of the most common symptoms of anxiety is fear, which includes the fear of dying. “You may…fear that the chest pains [a physical symptom of anxiety] are a deadly heart attack or that the shooting pains in your head [another physical symptom of anxiety] are the result of a tumour or aneurysm. You feel an intense fear when you think of dying, or you may think of it more often than normal, or can’t get it out of your mind.”