What Does an Anxiety Disorder Feel Like? Here Are 4 Signs You May Have a Problem

If 2.6 billion people were suffering from an illness, you’d think we’d all be more familiar with it. That figure represents 33.7% of the population of the world, after all. It also represents the share of that population that will at some point experience an anxiety disorder, according to the National Institutes of Health. For those billions, the experience of clinical anxiety can range from a persistent fretfulness, distractedness and a sort of whole-body clenching, to the paralytic crisis of a full-blown panic attack. All of it feels lousy; all of it is a state you race to escape — which typically only makes it worse. But all of it, happily, is diagnosable, controllable and ultimately treatable. The key is recognizing if your anxiety rises to the level of a clinical condition, and if it does, what to do about it. Anxiety may, by definition, feel bad, but that doesn’t mean it therefore is bad. It’s a menacing world out there, and your brain needs a way to grab your attention when you’re stumbling into danger. The job of doing that is actually handled by two brain regions: the amygdala, situated deep in the brain’s basement, and the higher, more complex cerebral cortex. As befits its humble location, the amygdala processes very basic emotions — fear, anger, guilt, envy — and handles them quickly and unthinkingly. The fear you experience from a menacing stranger and the fear you experience from a scary movie set off the sa...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized anxiety disorder behavior health OCD psychology PTSD Source Type: news