How to Tell if You Have Anxiety Disorder
February 19, 2011 by Dr Jeannette Kavanagh
Filed under Panic Attacks
If you’re someone who can never earn enough or have enough money to relax about it, and to enjoy spending it, you may have underlying anxiety problems that you haven’t had to face, or you haven’t wanted to face. If opportunities to travel become reasons for days or weeks of anxiety-induced upset tummy, while you worry about packing, not packing; getting to the airport on time; finding the right terminal; getting lost in a foreign airport, driving in a foreign country, then it might be a good idea to look at other areas of your life.
It’s Important To Confront Your Anxiety
Not so that you can find a label to put on your behaviour, but so that you can face your problems as the first step to managing them. Why? Because chances are that if you worry excessively about something as everyday as money or as unusual as travel, you may see that you spend a great deal of your day, every day, worrying in an unhelpful way about other things.
You probably also worry unduly about your job performance, and you’re far too concerned about running late for appointments and about your contribution to work meetings. Your anxiety switch is turned up way too high. Your anxietylevel is excessive to a point where your quiet enjoyment of life is being seriously impaired. Forget about whether or not you’re ill, your life is so filled with unhappy fear-filled feelings that you’ve forgotten how to feel joy and happiness. Joy is your birthright.
A person who has problem levels of anxiety, tends to worry far too much. Worry is their middle name.
They predict the worst about everything.
They worry, and sometimes feel intense levels of fear, about big and little issues. That anxietymanifests itself as uncomfortable physical symptoms throughout the day. Although that person may have days, even weeks, without feeling too much fear and anxiety about life, if they’re invited to address a meeting at work, or represent their political party at a debate, the roof of their world will cave in. Sometimes, the person with what I term background anxiety (anxiety that doesn’t manifest itself as debilitating attacks of panic, but stays in the background of your life), sometimes that person has had much more serious episodes of panic attacks and anxiety disorder in their adolescence or early twenties. Once they escaped from those attacks as many people do just by a process of maturation, they regard the less severe anxiety as perfectly normal. It’s not.
Generalized anxiety refers to a level of concern and worry that has become dysfunctional rather than helpful in your day-to-day life. As I mention throughout Calming Words, anxiety is a very important part of our lives. Without it, we would not get up in the morning in time for work, we wouldn’t study for exams, train hard for the Olympics, and nor would we make an effort to escape real and present danger.
In other words, if your plane leaves at 6pm and you have to be at the airport at 4pm, then you need to be there at 4pm. Making sure that you get there by 2pm or even 2.30pm can place a lot of extra strain on you, your family, and friends. Your normal, functional and helpful anxiety which works with you to get you there on time, has gone over the top. Given that you may not travel a lot, that sort of highly anxious approach may be understandable, and it’s not likely to affect your life too much.
However, it is likely that the same person who stresses out about being on time – to the point where he or she is obsessively early – that person will also always, or usually, think the worst when their relatives or friends are late, or ill.
Generalized anxiety is not just about being pessimistic, though that is a component of this type of anxiety. It is more that in every single sphere of life, the person worries, feels ill at ease, and yes, just plain anxious. The alternative – that of feeling positive and joy-filled is a state that s/he rarely feels.
Seeking Help With Your Anxiety Problem
Many people with generalized anxiety do not seek help for their anxiety because they put it down to “that’s just the way I am. I’m a worry wart”. That sort of generalized anxiety is perhaps more difficult to diagnose and treat than something like a panic attack. The panic attack is so intrusive into your life, and makes life so obviously unpleasant and difficult that people do reach out to seek help.
In the case of people who have generalized anxiety, they live a life of quiet desperation and profound unhappiness. Rarely do they just relax and enjoy, or even recognise, the blessings they have in their lives. A great deal of their time is spent criticising work colleagues and even family and friends – often seen as the cause of their anxieties. Because they rarely breathe in joy themselves, they are not as capable of transmitting sheer pleasure and joy in being alive to those around them.
Although it is always difficult to define what is a natural and normal level of concern about work, study, family, finances and the state of the world, it is such a waste of the great and finite gift of life, to spend so much of it in a negative, fear-filled, state. And usually, there is no good and rational reason for feeling that fear.
How often have you heard the expression: “Everything’s a drama to her”?
In all likelihood, that drama queen is a highly anxious person. Their anxiety and worry has led to the person experiencing at least three of the symptoms listed below.
If you regularly experience three or more of those symptoms, please check with your doctor: you may have physical reasons for those symptoms or you may have an anxiety disorder.
Author’s Note: Article published here.
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Dr Jeannette Kavanagh has a counseling and coaching Practice in Melbourne Australia, to help people find their unique solutions to anxiety and panic attacks. For over two decades, Jeannette has helped thousands of people overcome anxiety and panic attacks. Visit her website http://www.calmingwords.com/ to sign up here for a FREE MP3 Relax on Cue.
Read more articles written by Dr Jeannette Kavanagh
How to Recognize Anxiety in Children and Adolescents
February 10, 2011 by Dr Jeannette Kavanagh
Filed under Panic Attacks
Problems with a too-high level anxiety can start in childhood with children and adolescents worrying to a greater extent than their peers about all sorts of things. Some behaviors are an indication of a fussy and over tidy child. When we go just a little bit over fussiness and we have entered the realm of an anxiety disorder.
Anxiety in childhood is obvious when children and adolescents worry to a greater extent than their peers about school performance, sporting prowess, their appearance and their popularity. If the child has grown up with overly anxious parents, the tendency will be exacerbated. Even quite laid back, relaxed, children can become tense and anxious adolescents if their parents transmit their own fears and anxieties about their performance to their children on a regular basis.
Children who are growing up in a fairly relaxed family atmosphere can simply come across as ideal students, and parents may even be counting their blessings that their son or daughter does her/his home work without being nagged about it. The highly anxious child will be a perfectionist and s/he will require an excessive amount of reassurance about their performance. Although we all love our children to come home with an A grade, it is vital to watch for signs of anxiety accompanying their school work. A child who frets and even cries about an assignment in elementary (primary) school, cannot automatically be diagnosed as having generalised anxiety or indeed, any anxiety problems. However, it is good for parents to monitor those sorts of reactions. Children and adolescents with generalised anxiety may also worry about being punctual, their appearance, or impending catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, meteors flying to Earth and nuclear war.
Obsessive Thoughts And Compulsive Behaviors
If you notice that your child is excessively neat – send her or him to my place. I jest of course because we accept our children even when they missed out on the tidy gene. However, excessive concern about the tidiness of one’s room, or how clothes are arranged in a drawer, these are signals that say two things. First, you just happen to have a tidy and neat child. Secondly, the degree to which they are concerned about tidiness will let you know whether or not that often sought-after trait is actually a sign of their underlying anxiety. This article is not about obsessive compulsive disorder as it’s known. But it is important to mention that all obsessive thoughts and compulsive or ritualistic behaviours have their base in anxiety. Keeping those socks exactly 2.5cms (1 inch) from each other, having all the white shirts together, making and re-making the bed; those behaviours are used to keep the underlying feeling of anxiety at bay.
Signs Of Anxiety In Children
In many ways, it’s easier to diagnose anxiety in children than in adults because they haven’t learned yet to censor themselves. If they feel anxious about giving a talk at school, or even about going to school, children will communicate that to their parents or carers. In fact, many anxiety prone children will communicate their fears in very clear and sometimes alarming ways. The important thing for those around the child or adolescent with anxiety is for us to be supportive without being enabling. By that I mean that as a parent or older sibling, or friend, we must treat with respect the very real fear that the child is expressing. The injunction to “snap out of it” or the advice that “there’s nothing to be afraid of, you goose” might make you feel alright, but it will only make the anxious person more fear-filled. They will be less likely to open up to you when and if their anxiety escalates. So please don’t trivialise the fears. As for enabling some parents when faced with an obviously anxious child begin to over-protect them. They keep the child away from school camps and sometimes even from school.
Keep A Diary For Three Months
On the one hand most of you can readily diagnose whether or not your child’s anxiety switch is on overload. It’s the subtlety of some behaviors that can allow anxiety to go undiagnosed and untreated for years. Most of my counseling clients talk about being anxious at school and about being more generally anxious in their childhood. Yet none of them was treated for anxiety. While I certainly don’t want to suggest that the child who expresses worry and apprehension about delivering a talk to the class has anxiety and needs treatment, it might be interesting for you to keep a little diary of how your child reacts in other situations. If it’s a one-off very common fear of public speaking, your diary will remain blank. If not, you’ll have good material to discuss with a therapist if you decide to make that intervention.
Having said that many of my counseling clients were anxious children, it is also important to say that anxious children do grow out of their anxiety in the vast number of cases.
Editor’s Note: Previously published here.
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Dr Jeannette Kavanagh has a counseling and coaching Practice in Melbourne Australia, to help people find their unique solutions to anxiety and panic attacks. For over two decades, Jeannette has helped thousands of people overcome anxiety and panic attacks. Visit her website http://www.calmingwords.com/ to sign up here for a FREE MP3 Relax on Cue.
Read more articles written by Dr Jeannette Kavanagh
Anxiety Disorder and Panic Attacks: How Cognitive Behavior Therapy Can Help You
February 7, 2011 by Dr Jeannette Kavanagh
Filed under Uncategorized
In your journey to conquer anxiety and to eliminate panic attacks from your day-to-day life, no one approach will be totally right, but Cognitive Behavior Therapy can be a very powerful part of your recovery. In this short article, I want to explore what’s involved in Cognitive Behavior Therapy, so that you can make a decision whether or not you’d like to explore it with your therapist.
De-Constructing Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)
When we de-construct the term, we look at each of the three words separately to increase our understanding of the whole.
Cognitive
The first part of CBT is from the Latin cogito I think. Some of you might recall those Philosophy lectures about Rene Descartes and his famous ‘cogito, ergo sum’ – I think, therefore I am. In general conversation, we link ‘cognitive’ with an intellectual engagement. We hear about cognitive deficits caused by brain damage, so let’s say that the cognitive component of this therapy involves our brains, our thoughts. It explores how you think and react to things, and how those thoughts elicit an anxiety response or start your panic attacks. If you want to eliminate panic attacks, you have to recognize your role in creating and maintaining them via what I call unhelpful thinking, unhelpful habits of mind.
Behavioral Or Even Behavioural
In this treatment model, the behavior component isn’t just about how you behave in the sense of what you do. It’s also about how you react before you do things, and it’s also about how many of those behaviours become a habit and almost automatic. The behavioural component is also about the range of responses your therapists make available to you. Your therapist will work with you to find alternative ways to react, to break down your automatic responses. Through CBT, when you see that lift (elevator) door opening, you’ll be able to react in a calm way instead of automatically panicking about using the elevator. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is an extremely interactive approach.
Therapy
The third part of CBT, therapy, is from the Greek therape?a healing. The healing or therapeutic component is about what you and your therapist do. It might involve you learning relaxation exercises, but it’s also part of an ongoing conversation and series of observations about your thoughts, reactions and actions. My counselling Practice and my e-kit Calming Words involves helping people to learn to meditate and I encourage daily meditation as part of building up our reservoir of calm which is depleted daily by our hectic lives.
Eliminating Panic Attacks using Cognitive Behavior Therapy
Each anxiety or panic attack follows a well-documented cycle. R Reid Wilson in his book Facing Panic calls it the Panic Cycle.
First step is where you have contact with stimuli which makes you feel anything from slightly nervous to downright terrified. For instance, if you have had panic attacks in the shopping Mall, you’ll feel terrified just entering those automatic doors.
In a Cognitive Behavior Therapy approach your therapist would have you look closely at that initial trigger. You may be asked to do something that seems paradoxical: you may be asked to increase the number of times you experience that initial fear. That’s called an exposure-based intervention, and it can happen in your therapist’s office or in the Mall. It’s a way of allowing you to see what you already know at a rational level. Namely, that there is nothing to fear. Cognitive Behavior Therapy allows you to think (cognitive) about your fear response (behavior) so that you can construct a more appropriate response (heal).
At the end of most panic attacks the anxiety reducing behaviour of choice is avoidance. You stay home, or you only go to the Mall with a friend who knows about your problem, or you only go to the movies if you can sit on the aisle seat – ready for a quick escape.
You’re in charge. However, at both ends of the panic attacks cycle your reactions (cognitive responses) and behaviour (panic or escaping) are the cause of your continuing discomfort. Both sets of behaviour are inappropriate. Both can be discussed as a way of re-writing the script. What script? The one that says ‘enter Mall, feel terrified’. It’s your thoughts that evoke your adrenaline (fear) response. Through Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, we can help you work with those thoughts and responses to re-align them so that you change your response to entering the automatic doors at the Mall – or whatever triggers your fear.
Editor’s Note: This article published here.
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Dr Jeannette Kavanagh has a counseling and coaching Practice in Melbourne Australia, to help people find their unique solutions to anxiety and panic attacks. For over two decades, Jeannette has helped thousands of people overcome anxiety and panic attacks. Visit her website http://www.calmingwords.com/ to sign up here for a FREE MP3 Relax on Cue.
Read more articles written by Dr Jeannette Kavanagh
Maintaining Adequate Spill Containment Systems In The Workplace
February 6, 2011 by Rathi Niyogi
Filed under Uncategorized
A work area spill of toxic or hazardous agents can be a scary state for all concerned. The natural impulse for nearly all people when they recognize a discharge happening is to do their best to intervene and try to rectify the problem themselves. Unfortunately, this is nearly always the incorrect course of action – workers should in no way put themselves in a hazardous situation by attempting to actually halt or slow up a unsafe spill. This ought to be noticeably outlined in the course of spill containment training sessions with any workers who are exposed to hazardous agents during the process of conducting their duties.
Of course there is no replacement for the acceptable equipment. Spill pallets and spill berms should be on hand and in use as a primary safeguard against spill hazards. The main weapon that a risk administrator can deploy against the issues posed by spills is in the proper management of production and storage areas where spills are most likely to take place. Transportation corridors must also receive the similar sort of attention. If a spilled substance can be safely channeled into secure temporary or disaster holding spaces that are away from sparks, open flames, electrical circuits or employees then there is no requirement for staff to do something other than de-activate their device and leave the area in the event of a spill.
External storage tanks, be they for oil, gasoline or other types of chemical storage are often targets for overfilling or deterioration, both of which can cause leaking. The use of diking encompassing these tanks in order to collect spills and prevent the distribution of possibly flammable, corrosive or otherwise harmful liquids is recommended by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and in some conditions may in fact be mandated by law, depending on the volume of the tank being used. The need for these types of dikes and barriers can also be associated to the quantity of vehicular traffic in the storage space itself. Make sure that OSHA rules do not explicitly prohibit the installation of dikes near the container, as they do for those controlling certain chemicals such as liquefied petroleum gas.
In addition to dikes and barriers, OSHA also suggests the use of diatomaceous earth when controlling spills. Spreading this chalk-like substance is a proven technique of sopping up potentially treacherous liquids. If workers can carefully utilize diatomaceous earth via proscribed steps as an element of an disaster response plan that does not put them in any peril, then this may well be a competent option for containing a spill.
There are also chemicals existing which can be sprayed in the course of a spill through pressurized applicators that allow your workforce to keep their distance. These particular materials can not only hamper the progress of a spreading substance, but also reduce the effects of any fumes or even completely solidify the substance in question. At their most efficient, these agents not only harden a material, but also chemically change its combustibility so that it can be safely disposed of once the danger is over. Fast-acting agents can even be utilized to produce impromptu barriers as they can affect the primary edge of a spill to swiftly lose its fluidity.
Author’s Note: Previously published here.
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Rathi Niyogi is the CEO of CriticalTool, a national distributor of Spill Pallets and Spill Containment Berms and other safety products. If you thought this article was helpful, additional information on safety storage can be found at http://www.IndustrialSafetyCabinets.com/
Read more articles written by Rathi Niyogi
How to Tell the Difference Between Anxiety and Normal Worry
February 4, 2011 by Dr Jeannette Kavanagh
Filed under Panic Attacks
Anxiety is a normal feeling people experience when faced with threat, danger or stress. Feeling anxious can sometimes be a good thing. Occasional anxiety is part of normal life. However, for some people anxiety is a constant factor in their lives. When a person has anxiety problems, it interferes with their ability to function normally on a daily basis. Anxiety disorder can cause people to feel intense, long-lasting fear or worry, in addition to other symptoms.
Anxiety can actually help you by motivating you to prepare for a big test or by keeping you on your toes in potentially dangerous situations. It’s very important to realise that one should never be seeking a cure for anxiety, as in the total elimination of anxiety from your life. You need anxiety to equip you to get out of the way of real and present danger, to motivate you to do your best in school, work and sporting events.
Understanding Anxiety
Problems with too-high a level of anxiety involving unrealistic fear and worry are very common. It is estimated that that they affect about 16% to 20% of the U.S. population including people of all ages, races and backgrounds with one exception. Women tend to be more likely to have problems with anxiety than men. Either that, or as with all areas of health, they report their issues more than men.
Anxiety is a set of responses which everyone has when they perceive a threat to their safety, that is, when they feel danger. The human body is hardwired to automatically pump adrenaline into our system when danger confronts us. That awareness of a danger signals the involuntary nervous system to send immediate messages throughout the body, to either ‘fight’ (take the situation head on) or ‘flight’ (escape from the situation) or ‘freeze’ (as in a kangaroo caught in the headlights of hunters). This ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response is characterised by:
The anxiety response is essential to deal with dangerous or stressful situations.
However, if this reaction of fear does not subside when the real and present danger is over, it can become an anxiety disorder.
Anxiety disorder has a significant impact on a person’s life. The person will feel edgey all the time. They react to situations in a fear-filled way, even when the situation is not a threat or a danger. They know at an intellectual level, that their reactions to situations are inappropriate. They know that they are not really in danger. That awareness often means that people with high levels of anxiety criticise themselves for feeling those fears. If you feel fear sometimes amounting to terror, in a crowded restaurant, or at the Mall, or in a lecture theatre at College, it makes sense at one level to avoid those situations. After all, who wants to suffer through mounting feelings of fear? That’s why it’s so important to seek help.
While the first couple of episodes of fear can be tolerated, the way anxiety disorder and panic attacks develop is an ever-repeating cycle of (1) eg fear and panic felt at a concert;(2) next time you’re going to a concert, you anticipate that you might feel that panic again (3) just thinking you might feel it, almost always guarantees that you will. (4) Not surprisingly, you want to escape from the situation and eventually, you (5) start avoiding going to concerts. With the proper therapy, you can learn very quickly and easily how to react in a different way to situations that now make you have panic attacks.
Are You An Overly Anxious Parent?
Being a parent can provide everyone with legitimate moments of worry and even high anxiety. If your child has a high fever, you’d have to be made of concrete not to be anxious, fearful and a bit worried. Many first time parents err on the side of caution with their very young children whose temperature is often due to something as unthreatening as teething. It’s a balancing act. If you’ve raced your two year old to the Emergency Room at the local hospital with a high fever,which immediately dissipates after one dose of paracetamol or aspirin, no one would immediately diagnose you as overly anxious.
If from other symptoms you know that that child is cutting her or his two year old molars and likely to run a fever, then taking that child to the ER with every fever spike ( before administering an aspirin and waiting half an hour, to see if the fever eases) that’s perhaps an indicator that you’re overly anxious. So what? With young children, it’s better to be sure than sorry. Right? Yes. And no. Many of you reading this article will know that the panicky reactions you had to your two year old’s temperature spikes have never really left you.
You worry excessively if your nineteen year old daughter is even half an hour late. You constantly nag (or try to motivate) your adult children about their University assignments. Your adult children keep many things secret from you because they know your reaction will be an over-the-top show of concern. You spend far too many hours worrying and fear-filled about your children’s latest partner: none of whom is ever good enough.
It is normal for parents to worry about their children when they first learn to drive, and it’s even more normal to worry when children don’t come home at an expected time. What I’m referring to here is once again, a matter of degree. When a parent is actually becoming so distressed about an adult child being late that s/he is almost vomiting or getting diarrhea, then we are looking at anxiety which has become dysfunctional. As with all anxiety, it can be conquered.
Author’s Note: This article previously published here.
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Dr Jeannette Kavanagh has a counseling and coaching Practice in Melbourne Australia, to help people find their unique solutions to anxiety and panic attacks. For over two decades, Jeannette has helped thousands of people overcome anxiety and panic attacks. Visit her website http://www.calmingwords.com/ to sign up here for a FREE MP3 Relax on Cue.
