Managing Anxiety: Understanding, Coping, and Finding Relief

Understanding Anxiety and its Impact

Have you ever wanted to help someone who has anxiety? Well, I’m here to help you how to understand it and how to help cope with it. Anxiety is the feeling of being nervous or unsteady feelings about something and thinking about every other income in every situation. The term anxiety disorder refers to specific disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, panic attacks, and or social anxiety disorder. It is very common to have this kind of thing. It’s part of life.

Coping with Anxiety: Navigating Daily Challenges

What you can do to deal with it is get enough sleep, count to 10, slowly take deep breaths, and try to count down on caffeine. And or take a time out, take time to yourself and replace. Anxiety can have symptoms like feeling restless, being sweaty, and having nervous tics once in a while. Or feeling weak, having trouble thinking, and or sleeping. This is how you know if you have it. Panic attacks are pretty scary. It’s the sudden fear and feeling of helplessness with everything you do.

You will have breathing problems, and you will also have dizziness with it. That’s how you know you have anxiety. Many things can trigger this disorder, such as birth control and or weight loss pills or skipping meals. For example, when you don’t eat, your blood sugar will drop low, which can lead to jittery hands. A lot of negative thinking can also trigger it. If you think of every bad outcome, it will make you worried all the time, and parties and or social events can trigger it. This kind of anxiety is called social anxiety.

Personal Journey: Living with Anxiety & Developing Coping Mechanisms

My experience with this disorder is I have had it all my life, and it sucks, but I’ve learned to deal with it as I moved on. I have taken medicine for it, but it has not worked. Some say that it doesn’t help for some people, and that’s okay. I get it mostly every day. For example, when I walk past a group of people, I sometimes think they are talking about me and laugh. That’s with anyone, male or female. I just tend to think about it, and whenever I’m out into a situation I don’t wanna be in, I would think of every outcome that could come to mind. When I meet new people, if they are shy and never know what to say, I have really bad panic attacks to the point where my mom has to call someone for help.

I remember when I first found out I had it, and I tried everything that I could to try and help it, but now I learned how to cope with it. I know how to control it now. I know how to take deep breaths when I start to have panic attacks. My experience with anxiety has its ups and downs, and mostly, it’s been up. I’ve been keeping it under control, and to me, that’s good. Whenever I get nervous, I start to stutter, and when I do, I start to look around and cross my legs.

Those are some of my nervous tics. I also sometimes bite my lip. I used to bite my nails and chew on my hair, but not no more. It was really gross, so I broke some of my nervous tics only because I noticed most of them were unhealthy, so I knew I needed to stop it and break some of the unhealthy ones. Now, some of those I can not break, for example, stuttering, you can’t really control it, not at all. I know a few other people who suffer from anxiety, so I am a lot worse than mine, but that is because they don’t speak up about it and seek help as they should, or they simply deal with it.

Expert Insights: Unveiling Triggers and Treatment Approaches

But if you ever need help, speak up and talk to someone about it. To get the help you need and or want, I asked my counselor these questions to help everyone else to understand this kind of thing, which are the following. “Is it normal to space out after a panic attack?” She said it would be normal to space out after it. It’s not something everyone does, but it’s common. “How do I recover from anxiety if I don’t know my underlying factors or why I suffer from it?”

A good start would be learning how to use coping skills to increase calming and relaxing feelings. It’s a start to understand the triggers from it. “Is anxiety caused by a disease of the brain”? She said no, we never used the word disease to label mental illness. “How bad can it go to”? It’s more of a range of mild anxiety.

Spectrum of Anxiety Severity and Therapeutic Approaches

For example, you could look at someone and never know they have it. Or really bad to the point where some people don’t leave home. That’s called more difficult anxiety, which can have a number on a lot of people. It can either be bad or not so bad. Is there any other way to help this disorder other than medicine? “She stated that therapy and or talk therapy. Or CBT, which stands for cognitive behavioral therapy. She is trying to explain that there are many kinds of this disorder, and she breaks it down piece by piece, and that’s a bit more understanding to others since she is a counselor.

And she also doesn’t like to blame others for having anxiety. More teenagers have anxiety because most of their parents run their lives and make them do a lot. The parents try to push them to do harder in life cause they “want them to live a better life than the parents” and be better so they don’t make the same mistakes as their parents when they were younger. I understand about it because you don’t want your kids making the same mistakes as they did. I can understand.

Anxiety Statistics: Exploring Prevalence and GAD

I am gonna talk about the statistics for anxiety: it affects 18.1 percent of the world, that’s 40 million people in the world, and about 30 percent of kids and or teens in the world. Now, let’s talk about GAD. It means Generalized anxiety disorder affects twice as much in women than it does in men.

It affects 6.8 million. This disorder is normal and affects a lot of people. It is well known there are about nine other kinds of anxiety that can break things down, but the main one I’m talking about is GAD. It’s the most common one out there, and I have talked about this in the essay beforehand so you could understand it better. Another thing about GAD is characterized by six months or more of chronic, exaggerated worry and tension that is unfounded or much more severe than normal anxiety. Someone says, “It’s usually expected the worst out of things during an anxiety attack.”

References

1. American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.
2. National Institute of Mental Health. (2017). Anxiety disorders. Retrieved from NIMH official website
3. Mayo Clinic. (2018). Anxiety disorders: Symptoms & causes. Retrieved from Mayo Clinic official website
4. Smith, M., Robinson, L., & Segal, J. (2020). Therapy for anxiety disorders. HelpGuide.org.
5. Clark, D. A., & Beck, A. T. (2010). Cognitive therapy of anxiety disorders: Science and practice. Guilford Press.
6. Bourne, E. J. (2015). The anxiety and phobia workbook (6th ed.). New Harbinger Publications.
7. Bandelow, B., & Michaelis, S. (2015). Epidemiology of anxiety disorders in the 21st century. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.
8. Stein, M. B., & Stein, D. J. (2008). Social anxiety disorder. The Lancet.