gad ..what does it feel like?

[Jo1970]

When my anxiety is bad I feel anxious 24/7 mainly about my mental health and getting well. I don't worry about finances or family or other things as most descriptions of gad suggest. Hence cbt person said oh gad isn't relevant to you after being told by a psych that it was. Confused and wondered if all folks with general anxiety worry about everything or specific fears...feedback would help me...

[Linda 10]

I have gone through anxiety many times with things on my mind but it always ends up being the anxiety that keeps me in the loop of when will this end you stop worrying about problems just your anxiety xx
Linda 10

[Bill]

Another word for anxiety is worry and our minds love to worry. Something in our lives can affect us because we're often sensitive too or simply something we hear or see can trigger a worry for our minds to focus on. Not all by any means but a lot of us are natural worriers so any form of stress can trigger our anxiety.

If someone suffers from anxiety, it just means we're looking for dangers where others don't think of looking or dwelling on.

For instance, you're watching tv and someone says something that triggers a worry because it frightens you or you find upsetting. You try to shake the thought off but you feel you can't ignore it. This thought triggers feelings of being anxious because the thought scares you. The more you think about the thought, the more "what if's" surface so you end up going round in circles with this thought which is constantly keeping the anxious feelings alive because you keep giving the thought food to feed on.

I don't like the need to give anxiety various titles because generally I feel they're caused by us feeling overly stressed by something we experience which has triggered our anxiety. There is always a cause even if we can't see it ourselves and there are always ways of learning to cope even if we feel too ill to help ourselves.

Some people can worry about everything, others about specific fears just like phobias but to me they all just suffer from anxiety because something has triggered their minds to worry too much, and that worry is what causes us to feel ill because of the feelings that fear creates.

The more you focus on a fear, the more the fear will frighten you because you'll be allowing your mind to constantly dwell on all the what if's. Anxiety forgets us when we forget "it" which is why looking for labels which make us think we're ill can work against us so I wouldn't worry about giving yours a title or dwelling on whether it should be specific or general.

All you need to focus on is to learn how to train your mind and to find things that you enjoy to help you not to dwell on thoughts that frighten you and then you'll find all your anxious feelings will melt away because you're not feeding them through worrying about thoughts that frighten you.

One tip - don't sit and think. Keep your mind busy by doing things you enjoy.

[MyNameIsTerry]

The below is the information held in the diagnostic manual we use in the UK, the WHO ICD (currently version 10):

F41.1 Generalized anxiety disorder The essential feature is anxiety, which is generalized and persistent but not restricted to, or even strongly predominating in, any particular environmental circumstances (i.e. it is "free-floating"). As in other anxiety disorders the dominant symptoms are highly variable, but complaints of continuous feelings of nervousness, trembling, muscular tension, sweating, lightheadedness, palpitations, dizziness, and epigastric discomfort are common. Fears that the sufferer or a relative will shortly become ill or have an accident are often expressed, together with a variety of other worries and forebodings. This disorder is more common in women, and often related to chronic environmental stress. Its course is variable but tends to be fluctuating and chronic.

-116
Diagnostic guidelines
The sufferer must have primary symptoms of anxiety most days for at least several weeks at a time, and usually for several months. These symptoms should usually involve elements of:
(a)apprehension (worries about future misfortunes, feeling "on edge", difficulty in concentrating, etc.); (b)motor tension (restless fidgeting, tension headaches, trembling, inability to relax); and (c)autonomic overactivity (lightheadedness, sweating, tachycardia or tachypnoea, epigastric discomfort, dizziness, dry mouth, etc.).
In children, frequent need for reassurance and recurrent somatic complaints may be prominent.
The transient appearance (for a few days at a time) of other symptoms, particularly depression, does not rule out generalized anxiety disorder as a main diagnosis, but the sufferer must not meet the full criteria for depressive episode (F32.-), phobic anxiety disorder (F40.-), panic disorder (F41.0), or obsessive-compulsive disorder (F42.-)
Includes: anxiety neurosis anxiety reaction anxiety state
Excludes : neurasthenia (F48.0)

Now, without looking at the many other disorders, you can't always determine one over the other but I thought posting that might give you an idea of whether you feel you fit that.

Also, a psychologist/psychiatrist is more trained & experienced than a therapist. A therapist can be less able to make or diagnosis or unable to. For instance, my IAPT CBT therapist said she was unable to diagnose a Personality Disorder because it was too advanced for her grade, but a psychologist/psychiatrist treats all manner of mental health issue and is not so restricted hence they would be where mine would have advised me to go for a diagnosis.

So, unless you have given a different set of symptoms to the therapist, I would be leaning to the psychologist/psychiatrist.

I don't worry about everything and I have GAD & OCD, both of which were determined by my IAPT CBT therapist. My worries at the time we mainly about the physical symptoms (but not that they were illness other than anxiety), my work but not about finances, family, etc. When it comes to worries about your health, it can mean OCD or a Somatoform Disorder too so there has to be an element of differentiation. This can be achieved by them understand how much focus you put on health and the obsessive compulsive cycles which point more towards OCD or the Somatoform group.

What do you think?

---------- Post added at 05:52 ---------- Previous post was at 05:49 ----------




I don't like the need to give anxiety various titles because generally I feel they're caused by us feeling overly stressed by something we experience which has triggered our anxiety. There is always a cause even if we can't see it ourselves and there are always ways of learning to cope even if we feel too ill to help ourselves.

Some people can worry about everything, others about specific fears just like phobias but to me they all just suffer from anxiety because something has triggered their minds to worry too much, and that worry is what causes us to feel ill because of the feelings that fear creates.



Many will agree with you and many won't. However, as a GAD & OCD sufferer, I have had to do a lot of learning about my OCD and I know for a fact that it is a very different condition to GAD or other disorders. Without understanding the cycles in my behaviour, I wouldn't have broken them and you will find people with OCD lean more towards understanding these subforms and connections over taking a generalisation approach as subforms have different elements that mean making tweaks in treating them.

[Bill]

I've suffered from GAD without realising it for as long as I can remember. To me I never even thought about it as being an illness or condition. I just thought it was a part of me but a part that I really hated because I couldn't figure out why no else appeared have my problems until that is I realised it was actually very common.

My OCD started in my teens. I can remember having a lot of problems checking and locking things, counting, touching things such as anything black, walking behind black cars, looking for things that made me feel safe, repeating things etc. I can remember I wouldn't allow myself to make a mistake and things had to be perfect. Again, I never knew my problem had a label and it was just a part of who I was.

I never even thought about delving into what was wrong with me but then in those days there was no internet and I felt too embarrassed to talk about it. Friends used to joke with me when I used to constantly check something.

In my mind my OCD was a symptom of my GAD. The more anxious I felt, the worse my OCD became as the more tense and tight I felt. For instance, I might hear or see something that worried me or have an intrusive thought that scared me. When I tried to do something, that worry would stay with me and I'd feel the need to try and block it out with a safe thought. In the end I would forget what I was attempting to do because my mind was so preoccupied attempting to block out the frightening thought. It meant that I would have to go back to check again and again and I'd end up a nervous wreck.

Many years later long after my problems surfaced I was offered CBT but because the treatment was given to me away from home and in an environment where I felt safe, I found it rather ineffective although it did give me an understanding as to what was going on. When I went home, although I tried to do as they said, the problems were just as bad because I felt alone and too stressed to do on my own.

It was only a long time later when I had found ways to reduce the stresses in my life that were causing my GAD to be so bad that I felt able to work on combating my OCD which I did for myself without a therapist.

I got so fed up with wasting so much time repeating actions that I decided to take the chance and resist. I was actually surprised how the anxiety do go away slowly and when nothing went wrong I thought I'd give it a go when doing something else and so on. I found the more I stopped caring about repeating because of intrusive thoughts etc, the more my confidence grew so I felt stronger.

When I think back now to how I used to be, I feel so much better in myself. I'm not saying I'm completely cured of OCD but its nowhere near what it used to be and I doubt anyone would even notice when I do check something more than once on a particularly anxious day.

These days I don't really think about my GAD either. I know it's there and I've learnt how to accept it as being a part of me so that it doesn't stop me enjoying life so I feel if I can help myself, I'm sure many others can too when they feel well enough to attempt it.

They say about CBT being a tool and I agree with that. Just like making a plan when you want to achieve a goal. It only works when you feel able to put it in action and learn how to use it. A bit like trying to cross a bridge that frightens you. If you feel too frightened, it'll feel impossible to even attempt but with the right comfort and support to help someone feel safe, I believe anything is possible to overcome when it comes to general anxiety, phobias, OCD etc. To that degree giving a problem a label can help because if you know what you're dealing with, it can help you work out a plan to combat it. I just feel if we try to focus on it all the time, the more we feed the problem when it's easier to combat when we don't keep putting stress on ourselves. The more stressed we feel, the more difficult it is to treat because stress causes us to fear more when we need to learn how to not get tensed up, how to stay calm and not allow the bully inside us to keep frightening us.

I learnt that intrusive thoughts (worries) are just thoughts created by my anxious mind. They have no power or substance. Their only power is the ability to frighten us but when we feel able to just ignore these thoughts, we take their power away so that OCD actions are easier to resist. I feel sure that if we learn how to accept our anxious thoughts as just thoughts, we stay more relaxed so OCD becomes much less of a problem too so that in effect they are separate conditions but are interlinked with some but not all people with anxiety problems. I think I just accepted them as being a part of me so never thought to give them labels as a professional would but I must admit if anyone asked, I'd say I just suffer from anxiety without thinking about exactly what labels they would give them.