Occasional anxiety is a normal thing for everyone. But when your anxiety turns out to overwhelmingly persistent and seemingly uncontrollable or you begin to have excessive and irrational fear of every situations taking place in your life on the regular basis, then you may have developed anxiety disorder which could be disabling.

Anxiety disorders can be a serious medical illness which can be as daunting as other physical disorders such as diabetes or heart problems. It’s one of the most prevalent mental disorders that affect millions of people all around the world.

However, the scariest fact about anxiety disorders is that they not only affect adults but also strike children. In just the United States, more than 40 million adults have anxiety disorders while only 25 percent of those receive treatment despite anxiety is a highly treatable problem.

Anxiety disorders are actually known as specific psychiatric disorders, and can be further categorized as generalized anxiety disorder or GAD, agoraphobia, panic disorder or panic attacks, selective mutism, specific phobias, post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD and separation anxiety.

While some of anxiety disorders require counseling to overcome, there are also few that may need intense counseling and medication to finally get rid of the symptoms. For example, post-traumatic stress disorder needs extensive treatment and counseling to finally overcome the condition and live in the peace.

People with GAD can help themselves cope up with the disorder by a number of ways. For example, activities like sporting as well as other relaxing activities are good to help them enable themselves to learn living a worriless life.

On the other hand, those who experience anxiety because of drug abuse typically require going through rehabilitation in order to get rid of the addiction. Individuals with anxiety caused by medications are advised to stop using the medicines and follow alternatives after consulting their doctors.

Symptoms 

Different anxiety disorders have their own different ways to attack. Each type manifests itself in different symptoms. Let’s find out some of them here:

Panic attacks come with mental symptoms and cause the person to feel irregular heartbeat, chest pains, profuse sweating and excessive trembling. At times, it can also causes sufferers to have thoughts of death, lucid thought patterns, lightheadedness, and loss of control.

Those suffering from social anxiety often feel as if someone is constantly watching them thereby produces self-conscious fear. They avoid social interactions with people and restrict meeting others. Chronic anxiety sufferers, on the other hand, often explode normal activities due to less than possible consequences.

Causes

Mainly, anxiety has three theories about the possible causes of anxiety disorders such as biological, behavioral, and psychodynamic.

Biological causes presuppose chemical imbalance in the brain along with a genetic contribution to specific conditions such as panic disorder. Means if a family member experiences panic disorder, there is a likelihood of other member to have developed the same problem.

Behavioral causes are about learned behavior such as learned negative thinking patterns while psychodynamic causes include childhood issues such as experiencing a trauma in childhood.

Treatments

Anxiety is dealt with medications and therapies. Anxiety related therapies focus on revealing negative thoughts that are related with unrealistic dilemmas.  In most cases, medicines are only given as an initial part of the treatment while the main focus is always therapies that work effectively to cope with the disorder. The medications involve both anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs such as Etizolam that help relieve the symptom and must be used on the prescription of the physician.