Types of Anxiety Disorders

Approximately 15 percent of Americans suffer from different types of anxiety disorders. Nevertheless, what are these disorders? How different are they from fears? The answer is, it is quite easy to identify your fears, but it is difficult to put in words what exactly makes you feel anxious. Hence, anxiety is more of an internal disorder than being external.

There is no doubt that anxiety is always in the back of your mind or the unconscious mind. If you don’t become anxious about facing failure in everyday challenges that involve loss or failure, then there is definitely something wrong in you. In human beings, anxiety can affect us in different forms and different levels of intensity. It has the tendency to affect your whole being. It's a physiological, behavioral and psychological reaction taking place all at one time. Anxiety and high blood pressure go hand-in-hand. When you are anxious, there is some kind of change in your heartbeat.

However, anxiety is not only of one or two types of anxiety disorders, there are several of them. If you are anxious about a specific situation, then it is situational anxiety, which can turn into phobic anxiety if you fail to overcome it at the initial levels. Then there is anticipatory anxiety in which you worry about what will happen when you have to face one of your phobic situations. Over-dose of this type of worry often turns into anticipatory panic. However, if this persists for a long time and you are unable to make out the actual reason behind your anxiousness, then you have fallen prey to anxiety disorder.

These disorders are distinguished from day-to-day normal anxiety with respect to intensity, duration and interference in life. Depending on the cause, intensity, nature and symptoms, an anxiety disorder can be classified into different categories such as anxiety in children, Social Anxiety Disorder or SAD, Agoraphobia, Claustrophobia, and flying anxiety. Then there are some, which affect people with exclusive personal traits such as self-obsessions, who are vulnerable to obsessive-compulsive disorder . There are also those related to events such as the posttraumatic stress disorder . The most common ones are speech anxiety (stage freight), and performance anxiety which includes test anxiety (common in students). Then we have separation anxiety such as dog separation anxiety. There are also some exclusive situations, which lead to anxiousness. For instance, in women, anxiety and pregnancy are very much inter-related.

Medical experts have recognized all the above-mentioned types of anxiety disorders for more than 20 years. The American Psychiatric Association in their fourth Edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual added four more to the already comprehensive list. These mainly include those that are substance-induced, due to a general medical condition, Agoraphobia without a history of panic disorder, and acute stress disorder. It has become know that individuals can suffer from more than one type of anxiety disorder.

If you are concerned that you may be suffering from any of the above disorders, then it is advisable that you take the anxiety disorder test. This brief test is not to diagnosis but to give you an idea of which disorder you may be suffering from.

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