What Is Anxiety:
Do You Really Know What Anxiety Is?

What is anxiety? If you’ve ever been asked to speak before a group, or taken a test for which you knew you weren’t prepared, or were one of fifty people waiting to be interviewed for five job openings when your bank balance was shrinking by the day, you probably won’t have to ask “What is anxiety?”

But with the amount of stress which seems to affect the lives of everyone living on 21st century planet Earth, ii might be useful to distinguish between what is anxiety, and what is a more serious anxiety disorder.

You can help yourself understand what is anxiety by thinking of how easily you recover from the effects of unpleasant situations. If you dread speaking in public, and are asked to host your best friend’s 40th birthday roast, you may experience some alarming physiological reactions.

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Your heart may be pounding, your stomach churning, your knees shaking, and your brow perspiring. You voice may crack when you stutter out your reply. When you hang up the phone you may collapse, gasping for breath, on the nearest chair.

You, in other words, may experience what is anxiety, and what is also a necessary reaction to threats. If our bodies did not respond to so strongly to danger, we wouldn’t have lasted long on the windswept plains we once shared with saber-toothed tigers.

Anxiety is the sum of your responses to physical or emotional stress. Your fear of public speaking has turned you buddy’s birthday into a survival threat. That is, at least, what your brain is telling your body.

And what is anxiety for you will either remain anxiety, or build, as the great event approaches, into a fledgling anxiety disorder. It all depends on how quick you are to take control of the situation.

Your initial series of symptoms will, in a normal anxiety episode, begin to diminish within several minutes, as your brain processes the facts that the birthday party is still some time off and you can find either find a way to get out of the hosting job or to prepare for it. So before too long you have relaxed and begun your planning.

But if anxiety does not begin to diminish after a period of a few hours, and you have been obsessing about how you should never have agreed to host the roast because you will be the funniest joke at the party, and your friend will never forgive you, and you’ll have to avoid him or her from now on, and you wish you could just skip the whole thing, but then your friend’s feelings will be terribly hurt, and you are such a self-centered so-and-so for only thinking about yourself all the time, and… well, what is anxiety has begun to now become something much more serious. You are working on an anxiety disorder.

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