Anxiety Specialist Questions and Answers

Everyone worries or starts to feel nervous from time to time. Anxiety is a part of your normal human reaction to stressful situations. However, for many with anxiety disorders, those consistent fears and worries are not temporary and can get worse over time.

Anxiety disorders can severely impair an individual’s ability to function whether it be at work, school, or at social gatherings. Often, many try to cope with the negative reactions from anxiety by avoiding the situations or experiences that make them anxious, to begin with. This, unfortunately, will backfire and instead feed into the anxiety.

Our therapists at Best Fit Counseling & Psychiatry are professionally trained to diagnose anxiety disorders and teach our patients healthier and more effective ways to cope with anxiety. A form widely used is known as cognitive-behavioral therapy, this highly effective treatment helps patients to learn and identify while managing the factors that help contribute to their anxiety.

Our patients learn to understand how their thoughts contribute to their anxiety symptoms and learn to change those thought patterns by reducing undesired behaviors associated with anxiety disorders.

Anxiety is considered a disorder if it starts to cause significant distress and/or keeps a person from doing one part of their life like school, work, relationships, responsibilities, or activities they previously found enjoyable. The six major types of anxiety disorders can be listed as:

Phobias
Included intense fear of specific animals, objects or situations. An individual with a phobia will go out of their way to avoid a feared object or situation, or if they try to face it they experience severe distress.

Generalized Anxiety
An individual starts to worry about a range of different topics like school, work performance, finances, world events, natural disasters, relationships, and other things. These worries tend to be hard to control and continuously pop up, making it hard for them to focus on their activities.

Panic Disorder
When an individual experiences panic attacks that start to interfere with their life in some way. Panic attacks can include multiple symptoms like your heart racing, rapid breathing, chest pain, dizziness, nausea, abdominal pain or blurred vision, sweating, shaking, feelings of doom, feeling like the world is not real, experiencing a moment as though you are outside of yourself. Panic attacks can be triggered by something specific or come out of the blue.

Social Anxiety Disorder
Persistent fear of being judged by others. An individual can become intensely afraid of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing which can make others judge, criticize or evaluate them. This individual may start avoiding interactions with others but still only feel comfortable with close family and friends.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
While these used to be considered anxiety disorders, they are now classified under their own specific category due to each individual’s unique cases, unique brain structures, and unique treatments involved to help.

Separation Anxiety Disorder
An individual is persistently and excessively worried about being separated from or even losing their caregiver or attachment figure. This is extremely normal in a child’s early development; however, it can become excessive and impair their development. This starts when thoughts about what will happen to their caregiver when the two become separated. The individual becomes worried about what then would happen to themselves if they become separated.

Some common symptoms of anxiety disorder to look out for are:

1. Excessive worrying
2. Feeling agitated
3. Restless
4. Fatigue
5. Difficulty concentrating
6. Irritable
7. Tense muscles
8. Issues falling asleep or staying asleep
9. Panic attacks
10. Avoiding social situations
11. Irrational fears

Anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and depression are all considered psychological problems, as they are the result of biochemical imbalances, past experiences, and stress.

Best Fit Counseling & Psychiatry is home to a leading team of professionals who want to help everyone on their road to recovery. Call us for more information. We serve patients anywhere in Michigan and our corporate offices are in Ann Arbor MI and surrounding areas including Pittsfield Charter TWP MI, Ypsilanti MI, Saline MI, Dexter MI and Scio TWP MI.