1. Everyone gets anxious sometimes. It’s natural. Sometimes, however, when it’s irrationally intense or lasts an excessive length of time, you may need some help to stop it from impacting your daily life.
2. There are a few different conditions that come under the heading of anxiety disorder and their symptoms are similar but not the same, so you may need to familiarize yourself with all of them.
3. Symptoms don’t just involve mental stress, but often physical responses such as sweating or increased heartrate. Anxiety makes it difficult to concentrate on anything but your fear. A doctor will need to rule out other possible causes (like hormone or vitamin deficiencies), both physical and mental. Like all conditions, you need an accurate diagnosis for proper treatment.
4. Diagnosis can be tricky as there’s no simple laboratory test that can measure anxiety levels in your blood. It will probably involve questionnaires and an assessment of family history, which means you need to be open and honest with your doctor. It’s not easy, I know.
5. Once you have an appropriate diagnosis, treatment will often involve a combination of medication to relieve symptoms and therapy to master long-term coping strategies. Every person is different in how they respond to treatment, so you may need to experiment to find what works for you.
6. Exposure therapy is quite common for treating anxiety, especially phobias. It involves being directly exposed to the source of your anxiety (like spiders for arachnophobes), but it must be done in a controlled way. You can’t just shove a spider in someone’s face and think it will help.
7. Outside of a medical setting, some people turn to practices like meditation and mindfulness to bring anxiety under control. These can be very successful but won’t work for everyone. Be open-minded
8. Like with other areas of mental health, no treatment works without a willing and engaged patient. It takes effort and commitment to manage anxiety; there are no easy options.
9. Luckily, society is becoming a lot more open and understanding of mental health issues like anxiety, so it’s much easier to find the information you need to make informed choices.
10. That doesn’t make it any easier to ask for help, which is often the most difficult step, but once you do, there are people who will work with you to improve your situation.
