Information sheet: Anxiety
Anxiety
How prevalent is anxiety?
Anxiety is suffered by some 90% of patients seen by GPs in the UK. It is a major cause of work absence and a contributory factor in many organic diseases. High blood pressure, heart disease, stomach ulcers, bowel problems, can all be traced to long-term anxiety states. Suicide – often a last resort for the chronically anxious and distressed – accounts for the highest number of deaths in 15-24 year-old males second to road accidents.
How do you feel during an episode of anxiety?
You can feel uneasy or suddenly startled for no apparent reason and find yourself overwhelmed by fear. In the grip of a terrifying vertigo and/or breathlessness you may feel you are holding onto conscious-ness with a tremendous effort and by the thinnest of threads. You may feel utterly helpless, wholly lacking in outer or inner support.
Dizziness, sweating, breathlessness, tightness in the chest, tingling in fingers and numbness in hands, are all physical symptoms of an anxiety state that can trap us in a spiral where the effects of anxiety themselves produce further anxiety. You may feel that something inside you has gone terribly wrong. There may be what is called an agoraphobic reaction; the word denotes a fear of open spaces, but what is happening is that a fear of losing control is making you afraid to venture out of doors.
Anxiety differs from simple fear because of its severity and its frequent independence of any evident cause in the present moment.
What can be done to relieve anxiety?
Medical research has investigated anxiety exclusively in terms of how our brains produce or fail to produce certain chemicals. The drug industry has responded by providing increasingly powerful stress-inhibiting medications. These may mask some of the symptoms but will not help us address the underlying emotional issues. In addition, they can produce side-effects that involve unwanted physical, mental and emotional changes.
One side-effect can be the desperation that results from a belief, implied by the medical approach, that internal chemical processes beyond our control are launching attacks upon us. This can force us to feel alienated from our bodymind system and unsupported by our natural self-regulating powers. So, blinded by "science" and feeling helpless, we may readily welcome the medications our GPs prescribe.
What is anxiety?
The word comes from the Latin angustia, meaning narrowness or constriction. This gives a clue to the bodily reactions at work.
Anxiety states involve an involuntary constriction of breathing. This happens because, in order to hold back expression of our feelings or of any rising excitement that is deemed socially unaccept-able, we unconsciously hold or reduce our exhalations and inhala-tions. Supply of oxygen to the brain is diminished and we may experience vertigo and confusion, while the reduced supply of oxygenated blood to our muscles will make us feel weak and vulnerable.
We try to compensate for this by breathing more quickly, but this does not mean we breathe more fully. Quite the reverse: our lungs already contain the inhaled breath we are holding in along with our unexpressed feeling, so our breathing becomes fast but shallow. This is "hyperventilation" or over-breathing. It causes carbon dioxide to be eliminated from the bloodstream.
Carbon dioxide carries oxygen in the blood to tissues, which become irritated and tingly when deprived of oxygen. Smooth muscles will react to this by going into spasm; we might then find our fingers tingling and our hands getting numb. Our airways become narrow in an attempt to prevent the remaining carbon dioxide in the lungs from escaping. This causes breathlessness and tightness in the chest.
The episode will come to a natural end when (a) we faint, so allowing natural breathing to resume while we are not conscious enough to interfere with it, or when (b) a natural reflex of muscular trembling releases our fear and restimulates full breathing, or when (c) we become aware of our reduced breathing and the accompanying muscular tension and allow it to readjust naturally.
What is panic?
An anxiety episode is often called a "panic attack". Panic derives from "Pan", the ancient Greek god of nature. "Panic" was the ecstatic emotion associated with surrender to natural forces. In terms of our current use of this word to denote anxiety, "panic" could be seen as the result of an unconscious blocking of a feared uprising excitement.
What causes anxiety?
We can feel anxious for quite obvious reasons: an exam, an interview, stage fright, etc. But anxiety “attacks” seem to come without warning.
That they have no evident present cause suggests they may result from frightening past experiences. Early in our lives we may have found that expression of our fears was not welcome; so as well as fearing what we feared, we also feared the consequences of asking to be helped to withstand with what we feared. To hold back our feelings we had to hold in our breathing. This was necessary for our well-being in the past, but it has become a patterned response to present events.
As a result, situations that in some way resemble past experiences can trigger associated fears. The feeling of being catastrophically overwhelmed can reflect some early, original helplessness.
How can Counselling & Therapy help?
An experienced Centre worker can help us to help ourselves with our anxiety, initially by providing a confidential opportunity to get it off our chest without feeling judged as "weak" or "silly". Real information about the processes of anxiety can dispel many unfoun-ded fears.
We gain assurance that because we have survived past calamities we now occupy a position of strength in which we can explore those events at our own pace. A skilled and sensitive worker can gently encourage our capacities for self-understanding and our inner self-healing powers so that fears held in our bodies and minds may be naturally and effectively released.