What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is clinically defined as:
“An unpleasant emotional state for which the cause is either not readily identified or perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable.”
It is a feeling of fear that can be experienced in threatening or potentially stressful situations, whether real or perceived as real. The reactions to these situations, or circumstances, are intended to keep us safe in the face of potential danger, but these same inbuilt defense mechanisms can cause misery for the many anxiety sufferers.
This is the ‘fight or flight’ syndrome that is embedded into our psychological functioning, there to help us avoid dangerous situation by increasing reaction speed and mental alertness, assisted by a rapid injection of adrenalin into the body.
Anxiety and fear
Anxiety is a feeling of fear and fear is an emotional and physiological response to a recognized external threat. The problem for many people suffering anxiety is in how they recognize an external threat. A person suffering with anxiety will perceive a threat that may not actually exist, or feel threatened by something that could be trivial and non-threatening to others.
Phobias
Many people have phobias, like being scared of spiders. In these situations a person feels genuine fear but this fear and anxiety passes once the source of the fear has been removed. If a phobia is particularly intense a person will try to avoid whatever scares them, this avoidance may be taken to extremes and start to interfere with the persons lifesyle.
The phobia takes over and gradually increases, the more a person avoids the fear factor, the worse it can actually become. People can become extrememly emotional, hysterical and display actual physiological symptoms when confronted by their phobia and even though they may be aware that their fear is irrational, there is nothing they can do to control it.
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