Anxiety is a normal feeling people experience when faced with threat, danger or stress. Feeling anxious can sometimes be a good thing. Anxiety can actually help you by motivating you to prepare for a big test or by keeping you on your toes in potentially dangerous situations. In fact, it's very important to realise that one should never be seeking a cure for anxiety, as in the total elimination of anxiety from your life. You need anxiety to equip you to get out of the way of real and present danger, to motivate you to do your best in school, work and sporting events. The emphasis in Calming Words (www.calmingwords.com) is on providing you with ways to manage your anxiety so that you no longer live in fear of those feelings. Occasional anxiety is part of normal life. For some people anxiety is a constant factor in their lives. When a person has anxiety problems, it interferes with their ability to function normally on a daily basis. Anxiety problems can cause teens to suffer from intense, long-lasting fear or worry, in addition to other symptoms. Understanding Anxiety Problems with too-high a level of anxiety involving unrealistic fear and worry are very common. It is estimated that that they affect about 16 of the U.S. population including people of all ages, races and backgrounds with one exception. Women tend to be more likely to have problems with anxiety than men. Either that, or as with all areas of health, they report their issues more than men. Anxiety is the automatic physiological physical changes that occur in response to perceived threat or danger. On awareness of a danger, the involuntary nervous system sends immediate messages throughout our body, to either â€fight’ (tackle the situation head on) or â€flight’ (flee from the situation). This fight or flight’ response is characterised by: * Alert mind * Increased heart rate & blood pressure * Increased breathing rate * A feeling of fear or apprehension * Trembling, shaking or a feeling of restlessness * Feeling cold, clammy, chills or hot flushes * Feeling nauseous or butterflies in the stomach The anxiety response can be very useful in the short term to deal with dangerous or stressful situations. However, if this reaction does not subside when the threat passes, or is exaggerated, it can be counterproductive and disabling to the individual. The experience of having problems with anxiety has a significant impact on a person’s life including feeling constantly wound up and â€on edge’. People who have problem levels of anxiety react to situations in a fear-filled way, even when the situation is not a threat or a danger. As well as knowing that their reactions to situations are inappropriate, people with high levels of anxiety in their lives often criticise themselves for feeling those fears. If you feel fear sometimes amounting to terror, in a crowded restaurant, or at the Mall, or in a lecture theatre at College, it makes sense at one level to avoid those situations. After all, who wants to suffer through mounting feelings of fear? That's why it's so important to seek help. While the first couple of episodes of fear can be tolerated, the way anxiety disorder and panic attacks develop is an ever-repeating cycle of (1) eg fear and panic felt at a concert;(2) next time you're going to a concert, you anticipate you might feel that panic again (3) just thinking you might feel it, almost always guarantees that you will (4) you want to escape from the situation and eventually, you (5) start avoiding going to concerts. With the proper therapy, you can learn very quickly and easily how to react in a different way to situations that now make you have panic attacks. Are you an over anxious parent? Being a parent can provide everyone with legitimate moments of worry and even high anxiety. If your child has a high fever, you'd have to be made of concrete not to be anxious, fearful and a bit worried. Many first time parents err on the side of caution with their very young children whose temperature is often due to something as unthreatening as teething. It's a balancing act. If you've raced your two year old to the Emergency Room at the local hospital with a high fever, which immediately dissipates after one dose of paracetamol or aspirin, no one would immediately diagnose you as overly anxious. If from other symptoms you know that that child is cutting her or his two year old molars and likely to run a fever, then taking that child to the ER with every fever spike ( before administering an aspirin and waiting half an hour, to see if the fever eases) that's perhaps an indicator that you're overly anxious. So what? With young children, it's better to be sure than sorry. Right? Yes. And no. Many of you reading this article will know that the panicky reactions you had to the two year old's temperature spikes have never really left you. You are still dysfunctionally anxious to the point where you can never, ever, been able to get to sleep until your twenty-two year old came home from that party. You worry excessively if your nineteen year old daughter is even half an hour late. You constantly nag (or try to motivate) your adult children about their University assignments. Your adult children keep many things secret from you because they know your reaction will be an over-the-top show of concern. You spend far too many hours worrying and fear-filled about your children's latest partner: none of whom is ever good enough. A parent with generalized anxiety is very likely instead to transmit worry and anxiety to his or her children. For instance, even young adults still living at home with a mother who is highly anxious, can come home at 1am to find their terrified mother sitting up waiting for them. Given the adult status of the son or daughter, there will be no reprimands, but the parent will have sent strong signals of anxiety about her offspring. And of course that will not be the first time. In fact, that sort of excessive fear and concern will have been a pattern throughout the childhood and adolescence of the anxious mother’s children. It is normal for parents to worry about their children when they first learn to drive, and it's even more normal to worry when children don’t come home at an expected time. What I'm referring to here is once again, a matter of degree. When a parent is actually becoming so distressed about an adult child being late that s/he is almost vomiting or getting diarrhoea, then those symptoms of anxiety have become dysfunctional.
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