Anxiety Disorder

While normal in association with stressful circumstances, anxiety could become a health threat and problem when diagnosed as a disorder.

By anxiety disorder, specialists refer to a number of nervous ailments that are characterized by the appearance of sudden panic attacks and the constant discomfort of something lurking out there, threateningly.

Even if anxiety attacks are not a threat from a sheer biological point of view, they are very harmful if we consider the terror and what it can do to one's psyche. Most of the time, people who get to develop an anxiety disorder have in fact suffered from repeated panic attacks that caused a disabling condition eventually.

An anxiety disorder will most frequently develop in an individual who has some form of genetic predisposition or a hereditary sensitivity of the central nervous system. The panic attack appears only when such an individual becomes exposed to an external stressing element that is normally facilitated by traumatic events, extended stress, medical procedure or the use of drugs or prescription medication.

This means that people who have just gone through a very intense life experience that has marked them in a negative way, are prone to developing an anxiety disorder from an initial panic attack.

How does an anxiety disorder evolve from an accidental panic attack? Well, the first terrifying experience with all its symptoms, creates a sensitivity at the level of the central nervous system. Afterwards, the person is a lot more susceptible to external threats of a varied nature. It is common to start misinterpreting a pain in the chest as a symptom of a panic attack, and thus start another episode in the vicious circle of the anxiety disorder. Even if there is no external threat to justify the appearance of panic episodes, the person often starts fearing the anxiety symptoms as such and gives them rather catastrophic proportions.

The treatment for most anxiety disorder cases consist of behavioral and cognitive therapies meant to break the vicious circle in which fear of panic attacks causes panic attacks. The use of antidepressants or tranquilizers is just a temporary relief method and should not be used for long periods of time. In fact, such drugs are only available prescription based and will therefore involve constant medical observation. If other therapy forms are not used in parallel with drug administration, symptoms may very well return when the treatment is over and the anxiety disorder could thus progress to more severe forms.