What is anxiety?

It is absolutely normal to be fearful or anxious about a forthcoming event, situation, exam, or driving test etc. But there is a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is apparent when you are experiencing something frightening at that moment which triggers your fight or flight response. This is a primitive response designed to help you in times of real or perceived danger, to stay and fight or to run away to secure your safety.

How is anxiety created?

Anxiety however manifests itself often through stress or exposure to an external trigger, but sometimes for no apparent reason, nothing tangible. It may bring a feeling of uneasiness, of something not quite right, anxiety is something you’re unable to put a finger on. You may wake up with a feeling of worry and dread with an anxious churning in your stomach, but nothing to attach the fear to. This is what’s known as “free floating anxiety”, essentially something inside yourself, but out of your control. Carl Jung, a 19th century psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology described it “as fear spread thinly”. Living with these feelings day in and day out is exhausting and not helped by the fact you are probably unable to get a good nights sleep. Anxiety and worry too are enough to trigger the fight or flight response, flooding your body with hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, but with no physical outlet for the body’s readiness to fight or run away. Continued and relentless exposure to this cocktail of hormones can give rise to physical, psychological and behavioral symptoms known as anxiety disorders.

Anxiety disorder

This kind of anxiety is likely to be driven by bottled up negative emotions that are not in our conscious awareness, more often than not from our childhood years. As youngsters we’re simply not mature enough to deal with deeply upsetting events and traumas, and the only way our young minds can cope with it at the time is to bottle it up away from conscious thought. However, exposed to certain external triggers in later life, these negative emotions have a habit of seeping out as symptoms and can include:

Panic attack symptoms

Panic attacks can be the result of an external trigger, such as exposure to something you are intensely phobic about, but often come out of the blue without warning. Panic attacks are brief but involve very intense physical symptoms, starting quite abruptly and can last from a few minutes to up to around ten to twenty minutes. Are you looking for treatment for anxiety in Hampshire or surrounding areas and have at least four of the following symptoms:

The symptoms of a panic attack are very real, intense and quite frightening. These attacks can leave you fearful for another such panic attack so much so that the fear is then self perpetuating and begins to take over the way you live your life. You may find it very difficult to leave the safe confines of your home, fearing losing control and having an attack in a public place. Trapped in a cycle of worry and dread, always expecting the worst, leaves you unable to go about your daily life and business in a normal manner. Psychologically, anxiety can go hand in hand with feeling low and can knock on to many areas of your life.