Archive for the ‘About Anxiety’ Category

Here are 8 short documentary’s on anxiety,depression, and stress, in video number 8 he talks about Is Anxiety Inherited, do we have an anxiety gene?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Is Anxiety Inherited, he is not saying a definite no to this, but what i feel he is saying is, that the behaviour is learnt.

It has been a known truth for many years that anxious parents can pass anxiety disorders on to their children.  Although this truth is well known, no one is prepared to say yes to this question "is anxiety inherited”.

But now, a modern study by the scientists at Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre, came up with the deduction that a family-based program where parents and children are being treated jointly, can lessen the symptoms and risks of anxiety amongst these children.

Each person can get nervous from time to time, but when the crisis starts taking over one’s life, the state is then called anxiety disorder. It can be exceptionally stressful and prevent people from living their lives fully. Some individuals with anxiety disorder may also have phobias and develop panic attacks.

For the study purposes, the Hopkins investigators looked at 40 children among the ages between 7 and 12 years. The children were not diagnosed with anxiety disorder themselves but all of them had at least one parent who was diagnosed with the condition.  What other proof do we really need to answer the question "is anxiety inherited".

Researchers at random split the participants into two groups, with 20 of the children and their families taking part in an 8-week cognitive behavioural therapy program, while the other 20 were put on a waiting list and did not receive any treatment during the period of the study, but were offered therapy one year later.

The CBT program, which consisted of one-hour-long weekly sessions, was focusing on an improvement of problem-solving skills, schooling about anxiety disorder, as well as helped parents ascertain and change behaviours supposed to contribute to anxiety in the children.

The primary researcher of the study, Dr. Golda Ginsburg, PH.D., a child psychologist at Hopkins Children’s Centre and an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said that according to the records gathered by the experts, the children of parents with an anxiety disorder are up to seven times more likely to develop the disorder themselves, and up to 65 per cent of kids who live with an anxious parent meet the criteria for anxiety disorder.

The results of the experimentation revealed that within a period of 12 months, 30 per cent of the children who did not participate in the program, had developed an anxiety disorder, compared to none of the children who were enrolled in the family based therapy. A 40 per cent decrease in anxiety symptoms in the year after the therapy program were independently reported by parents along with investigators who analyzed the behaviour of the kids and their parents. There was no drop of anxiety symptoms observed among children on the waiting list.

The parental behaviours modified with therapy program included overprotection, excessive criticism and excessive expression of fear and anxiety in front of the kids. The program targeted childhood risk factors such as avoiding anxiety-provoking situations and anxious thoughts.

According to a recent editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, it is prevention and not treatment, of childhood anxiety, that is of a chief importance, because anxiety disorders affect one in every 5 children in the United States, but very often are left unrecognized. If not addressed in time, the problem can lead to depression, substance abuse and poor academic performance throughout childhood years and way into adulthood.

Results of the study will be published in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The study was funded by the US government’s National Institute of Mental Health.  So "is anxiety inherited", yes.  Can we change the pattern of behaviour yes!

For those of us who suffer with anxiety attacks, we know what it feels like. Our heart pounds. We get butterflies in our tummy. We agonize and fret over everything and anything.  We have hot and cold sweats.  Our throats go dry and we have difficulty swallowing, just to name a few.

If you are experiencing any of the above, then you may well be suffering with anxiety attacks.

Anxiety attacks can transpire out of the blue.  I have spoken with plenty of people who have said "my life is great; I don’t understand why I am suddenly suffering with anxiety attacks".  That’s the nature of the beast.  There is no designated format for anxiety attacks.  They can happen to people whose lives are going really well, as well, as those who lives are not going so well.

This is why anxiety attacks are so tricky to diagnose.  It’s not like having a cold or some other illness, where there symptoms are typical and simple to observe and diagnose.

Understanding what anxiety attacks are will assist you to have more control. It’s normal to worry and feel tense or scared when under pressure or facing a taxing situation. Anxiety is the body’s natural response to danger, an automatic alarm that goes off when we feel threatened.

From my personal understanding off living with anxiety attacks, I am aware of the fact that the more you think about the anxiety the stronger the symptoms become.  The stronger the symptoms, the stronger the anxiety attacks become.  Then you’re in the realms of a viscous circle.   This is when it becomes really tough to over come your anxiety attacks.

It’s not till you truly become aware of the fact that your thoughts have manifested your anxiety, so it stands to reason that if you have shaped the anxiety attack then surely you can UN-create the anxiety attacks.  This part is really hard for people to understand.  And I know precisely how they feel!  When I was told this, I rejected it.  Why would I want to do this to myself?  It did not make sense.

But at the end of the day no matter how much I tried to take no notice of that fact, it was true, my thoughts where the origin of my anxiety.  I experimented with it.  The more I focused my energy on the anxiety the stronger my anxiety attacks became.  So with the help of a therapist, I was able to work on my thoughts and beat my anxiety.

I am not anxiety free, although I am able to prevent my anxiety before it becomes a full blown anxiety attack.

Another thing to bear in mind, is that anxiety may be unpleasant, but it isn’t always a awful thing. In fact, anxiety can help us stay aware and focused, spur us to action, and prompt us to solve problems. But when anxiety is continuous or overwhelming, when it interferes with our relationships and activities-that’s when you’ve crossed the line from normal anxiety into the territory of anxiety disorders.

This video is really informative about how a Anxiety Disorder affects the body.  The video talks about the 5 main Anxiety Disorders and how they may affect you.  If you think you may have a Anxiety Disorder watch this video, it could help you.

This is a great video on Social Anxiety Disorder!  There are so many people who have symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder.  They can range from feeling shy and uncomfortable in front of people to the extreme of becoming house bound.  watching this video may help you to understand what is going on for you, and whether or not you may be suffering from Social Anxiety Disorder.

Anxiety is a person’s normal reaction to conditions or situations which make us worried, uneasy or uncomfortable. The response may be physical, emotional or behavioural. Factors that trigger  anxiety might include pressures from work, stress from home, lack of exercise or sleep, or medical conditions. The food we eat is also a precondition for anxiety attacks.

There are quite a lot of highly recommended foods for anxiety attacks. If we do not correctly nourish the brain’s neuro-transmitters, then it is generally likely that we do not have adequate nourishment to balance the brain’s activities. Consider eating foods that are rich in vitamin B and amino acids. Chicken, beef and most especially tuna are highly recommended, as well as green and leafy vegetables like broccoli, spinach and cabbage. Milk and milk products like cheese and yogurt have high-protein contents.

Although chocolates and other sweets are in general accepted as mood enhancers, these foods for anxiety attacks may only give a "roller coaster" effect on your brain activities which gives you a abrupt surge of energy and then in due course pull you down to an all-time low. Stay out of food that are prepared of simple sugars to remove mood swings, and try to maintain a healthy portion of fish, vegetables and fruits for a more steady source of energy.

But eating the correct foods for anxiety attacks is simply one of the promising ways to handle anxiety. Of course, the foremost step is to have a discussion with a physician who will at the outset have a accurate diagnosis to your condition so the necessary steps can be undertaken. There are cases when foods for anxiety attacks may be complemented with prescription medication, or other alternative methods.

In a large amount of anxiety conditions the best treatment that is most often recommended is to undergo psychotherapies. These methods not only relieves the symptoms of anxiety, but also gives a more lasting solution to it. It teaches the person how to identify with his situation and recognize the factors that causes anxiety. From there, the psychotherapist and the patient can work together on the best possible solution to anxiety attacks.

How anxiety disorder effects the body.  A short but very informative video.

Having anxiety attacks is almost certainly one of the most unnerving bodily feelings you can ever receive.  One of the major tribulations with having anxiety attacks is that, it can’t actually be seen by anyone else, so you can feel totally isolated and by yourself.

Heaps of times the individual who is suffering from an anxiety attack does not know what is going on, which contributes to the amount of the anxiety.

Having anxiety attacks can be soul destroying, it can actually turn your life upside down.  I have not got this from a book; I have lived with anxiety attacks for over 20years, also my Mum has suffered with anxiety attacks as well.

My anxiety attacks would appear out of the blue, I may well be out shopping having a enjoyable time, then that dreaded feeling of not feeling right would start to creep up on me, then that feeling would get stronger and more powerful and before I knew it I would be having a major anxiety attack in the middle of a shop.

  I can tell you it is really frightening, but those of you reading this will have some sort of insight of what i mean.  That unpleasant feeling where you start to feel all hot and uptight, your vision starts to go and you feel like the shop is drawing in on you.

How I would depict my feeling is like this, I was aware of everything that was going on around me, but I felt like a part of me had withdrawn into myself, if that makes sense.  For me I just desired quite, I could not deal with with anyone talking to me.  I had to focus on what was taking place with me.  I don’t know what I thought would happen but I just needed to gain control.

What I found really hard was trying to get my husband to understand what was happening to me.  To try and get him to recognize how I was feeling and what having anxiety attacks was doing to me mentally, physically and emotionally. 

It was pointless really; know one known’s what having anxiety attacks are like unless you have experienced them for yourself.

Anxiety and panic attacks can be bought on by many different things, such as stress, depression, grief and alcoholism.  What ever it is triggered by, the affect is that your mind is saturated  with worrying and frightening thoughts. And these thoughts really do influence your life. Everybody who suffers from Anxiety and Panic Attacks knows only to well how scary that panic mode can be. Coming to terms with the fact that it is not the intrusive thoughts that are accountable for your anxiety, but the way you react to those thoughts, that triggers your anxiety or Panic Attack.

For loads of anxious folks, there dwelling or a room in their domicile is a reliable haven.  But while the anxiety and panic plague these safe places, it can leave you feeling entirely helpless and on your own.  Folks who do not suffer with Anxiety or Panic Attacks have no concept as to how to a great extent these feelings take over our lives.

  Having Anxiety and Panic Attacks can really change your self-esteem.  People saying upbeat things to you, have no sincere affect, but people saying downbeat things really hit you hard.
It works very much the same with your thoughts, when you have destructive or disturbing thoughts, you tend to  focus on them and not the positive and happy thoughts… and then so it goes… off into panic. Learning to organize our thoughts is a step towards beating Anxiety and Panic attacks. In my case I learned that these attacks would not hurt me, that was the difficult part. I then learned that if I faced my thoughts and the things that made me anxious, I could seize control again and not be stopped by my Anxiety Disorder.

Anxiety can be overcome, once you start to get an awareness of what is causing your anxiety, you can then learn some coping skills to help you over come your Anxiety and Panic Attacks.

What extremely saddens me is that the only treatment for anxiety and panic attacks the doctors are recommending is tablets. Do not get me wrong  taking medication to assist me get back control of my anxiety and panic attacks does help. But I’m aware that taking medication solely serves to mask the anxiety it’s not actually a cure.  Yes you might go weeks, months or perhaps years without a anxiety or panic attack.  But it can return back.  It comes back because you have not addressed the actual reason for the anxiety.

When figure out what is causing your anxiety, you may doubtless find that you’ll be able to realize a more effective treatment.  I recognize from personal expertise that it will be terribly arduous and distressing to work through your anxiety, however there is value in it, in the long run. You ought to recognize that external factors, such as work and home stress will cause us to feel moments of anxiety when they are not handled, but why is it that some individuals can just house this stress and others can’t? It’s because of our hormones and the balance of them in our bodies.

We tend to all have moments which stress us out and cause us to feel wired or anxious. These moments can persist with us and leave us feeling worried over things, but if your body is making the right balance of hormones, it’s unlikely that these situations can cause you to possess a panic attack in the future. However, if your body is not making enough dopamine, that is the pleasure and youth hormone, and enough serotonin, which is the "feel good" hormone, then it’s probably that your body is making way too much cortisol, which is the hormone that creates us feel a lot of stress. This imbalance is probably inflicting you to become depressed, anxious, sleepless and you would possibly even be having panic attacks.

However it’s not simply these factors that can contribute to you having anxiety, it might conjointly be that it runs in the family.  Although it’s not been medically proven there are thousands of case studies that have been done on the family connection.  For me my mother suffered with anxiety and panic attacks and i spent a chunk of my childhood observing this behaviour.  Guess what i learnt that behaviour, i learnt to worry, i learnt to panic in stressful situations.  I’m not blaming my mum it is not her fault.  It’s simply a fact of life, that as kids we have a tendency to are like sponges and take in everything that’s happening around us.

So it sort of made sense to me, if i learnt that behaviour then surely i may un-learn that behaviour.  It’s about owning what are your thoughts and feelings and letting go off the thoughts and feelings that aren’t yours.  This doesn’t happen over night but by being persistent and sticking at it, over time your thoughts do win through, you’ll be able to replace old behaviour patterns and replace them with new ones.  Ones that will enhance your life not destroy your life.

Bear in mind, anxiety and panic attack treatments don’t all come in prescription form and they don’t seem to be all expensive or lifetime commitments, therefore go searching a little bit and see what you’ll realize when it comes to more natural anxiety attack treatments that truly treat the underlying problems so that you can feel in control again.