In today’s society, it is difficult to reconcile our family and personal life with our work life. If the pace we have in our day to day is excessive, we are likely to develop stress.
Stress is a response that our body has to a specific situation that requires many resources. If we do not believe that we are capable of dealing with it successfully, we are likely to feel overwhelmed, nervous and eventually feel exhausted.
Anxiety arises when we have a continuous stress in our day to day. For example, we will feel stress before a project that has to be delivered next week at work, and we will feel anxious if we have important projects every week and with a very demanding delivery date.
It is important to identify stress when it arises to learn how to handle it in a way that prevents it from becoming chronic and interfering with our emotional health. The most serious consequences of continued stress and anxiety are:
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Anxiety Attacks and Agoraphobia. Anxiety attacks occur when there is a very rapid and intense increase in anxiety that is extremely unpleasant for the person. You may feel discomfort, shortness of breath, palpitations, dizziness, fainting, sweating, trembling, nausea and tingling. Also sometimes excessive anxiety can produce a sense of depersonalization (feeling like I’m out of my body) or derealisation (feeling I’m not there). During attacks the fear of dying and the fear of going crazy may appear.
Anxiety attacks are usually unexpected at first, although as time goes on they are associated with a place or situation such as the car, the subway, planes, elevators, etc. When this happens we say that there is an anxiety attack with agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is the fear of having anxiety or similar symptoms in public places or from which it is difficult to escape. For example, agoraphobia can be a fear of fainting in the dentist or in the tail of the cinema, places where fleeing is complicated.
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Fears and Phobias. A fear is the anxiety we feel before a specific object or situation. At first they are adaptive and help us to be cautious, avoiding situations of danger. A fear can become irrational when our reaction is excessive compared to the threat posed by the object or situation. For example, when we run out or we cannot enter the house because there is a cockroach on the ground. Fear is also irrational when it affects our day to day. For example, if we are afraid of the subway and cannot move around the city. When fear is irrational and excessive it is called phobia.
Fears arise from direct experience, or because someone tells us that something is dangerous. This means that, for example, the news greatly influences our fears, because if we hear that there has been a traffic accident we tend to «learn» that driving is dangerous. However, this is harmful in the case of excessive fear or phobias, since sometimes we can take fear of something very safe just because we remember an accident that occurred. This is very typical in the case of fear of flying. There are more than 3,500 flights a day, and yet we remember an accident that occurred years ago. This makes us feel that flying is dangerous, although reality proves otherwise.
Among the phobias there are several that make our life enormously difficult:
– Fear of driving
– Fear of Flying
– Fear of Sickness
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Social Anxiety. Social anxiety is the discomfort and nervousness that is felt before the fear of being evaluated negatively by others in a situation with other people. This anxiety can affect our well-being and our life, since many situations of our day to day are social. Social anxiety arises because the person is concerned about what he says and does, thinking that others are constantly evaluating it and that they will judge it harshly if he makes any mistake. That is to say, there is a constant self-evaluation and a perfectionist goal that makes him see that a supposed mistake is something unforgivable.
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Generalized anxiety. Generalized anxiety is a constant concern for negative events that may occur to the person or to their family and friends. The worry is for routine things of the day to day, reason why the person lives in a constant anguish. Generalized anxiety differs from other anxiety problems in that the person does not have as many physical symptoms, but are more thoughtful. The symptoms of generalized anxiety are irritability, restlessness, difficulty sleeping, difficulty concentrating and muscle tension. In the long run it is a very exhausting and exhausting situation.
Diana Faón Psicoterapia 