What Is Anxiety? Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prevention

When you visit your healthcare provider, you can expect that your doctor or nurse will ask you about your symptoms, perform a physical exam, and order lab tests to rule out other health problems. If tests don’t reveal any other conditions, your doctor will likely refer you to a psychiatrist or psychologist to make a diagnosis.

A mental health professional will identify the specific type of anxiety disorder that’s causing your symptoms. They’ll also look for any other mental health conditions that you may be experiencing, including depression.

The Different Types of Anxiety Disorders

What Is Agoraphobia?

Agoraphobia is often comorbid with panic disorder — meaning people often suffer from both conditions at the same time. It’s an intense fear of not being able to escape whatever place you’re in if you were to have a panic attack or an embarrassing experience such as incontinence, and it can often lead to an avoidance of leaving the house. People with agoraphobia can fear situations where this anxiety might flare up and typically don’t feel comfortable or safe in public, crowded places.

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What Are Some Other Phobia-Related Disorders?

Phobias are a type of anxiety disorder. A specific phobia is an “excessive and persistent fear of a specific object, situation, or activity that is generally not harmful.”

 Examples include fear of flying, fear of heights, emetophobia (fear of vomiting) and arachnophobia (fear of spiders). People with specific phobias often understand that their fear may be irrational, but they still experience intense anxiety, and their desire to avoid triggers may interfere with their daily routines. Even simply thinking about the situation or thing associated with the phobia can cause anxiety.

Specific phobias can develop in childhood, but they can also arise in adolescence or adulthood, often with a sudden onset, and are sometimes the result of a traumatic event or experience.

What Is Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)?

Generalized anxiety disorder is a condition in which your worries about a wide range of things overwhelm you to the point where your daily routine may be difficult to carry out, and you have been worrying this way for at least six months. You may feel on edge and have difficulty focusing on tasks. There may be a tendency to fear and expect the worst; some call this catastrophic thinking. You may know that your worries are perhaps irrational, but you continue to worry.

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What Is Panic Disorder?

Everyone has probably experienced a feeling of panic, or something like it, at least once in their lifetime: on a disturbingly turbulent airplane, or before giving an important presentation, or after realizing you hit reply all when you really, really should not have. We all know the paralyzed feeling and the heightened physical sensations. But panic attacks and panic disorder take a different shape. Panic attacks have many physical symptoms and tend to peak around 10 minutes and may last for 30 or more. Panic disorder is diagnosed by having recurrent, unexpected panic frequency of these attacks, along with unhelpful changes in behavior and/or the fear of having them.

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What Is Social Anxiety Disorder?

Many of us may know what it feels like to be nervous before a party or when meeting new people or making an important phone call. Those with social anxiety disorder have very intense versions of those fears — intense fears of being judged by others that trigger intense distress and may cause them to avoid those kinds of situations. For most people, fears of social situations usually subside once the intimidating event has been faced. But in social anxiety disorder, these feelings are more pervasive and usually last for at least six months.

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