Anxiety Disorder - Basic facts

What is anxiety and how is it different from fear?

Anxiety is sense of fear without a obvious threat. Whereas fear is a usual response to an apparent, truthful threat to your physical well-being, anxiety often feels abnormal and without use or function. Imagine while you are crossing a road and unexpectedly a car appears speeding in your way. You will most likely experience the following feelings of fear:

• Your heart beats faster
• Your breathing become hurried
• You may perspire
• Your mind focuses
• You mind and body become ready to take protective action

These reactions, which happen in a millisecond, will save you from hitting with car, and you should be grateful for your built-in alarm system.


Anxiety, conversely, feels more troublesome than supportive. Put side by side the logic and efficiency of the fear response to these common features of anxiety:

• You may not be able to identify why you’re afraid
• If you have a reason, it’s not a believable one (it may be illogical)
• The threat may be distant in the past or future
• The threat could be distant geographically
• When you don’t know why you are frightened, you feel a sense of apprehension
• Because the fear lacks focus, you have more difficulty finding a solution to end it.

Moreover, anxiety is vicious cycle. The more you notice yourself feeling anxious, the more anxious you may become.

What are the causes of anxiety?

Many factors contribute to anxiety, and several of them may be responsible in each particular case. Here’s a list of the causes most often related with the development of anxiety disorders:

Genes and anxiety.

Our genes are responsible for some of us up to be vulnerable to problems with anxiety. If a number of your close kin suffer from anxiety problems, you are at an enhanced risk for developing an anxiety disorder. In other words sensitive alarm system, you may inherit.

Anxiety results from early life experience.

Early life events and experiences can also make us more likely to develop problems, especially if these experiences are traumatic and leave an echoing alarm in our heads. Just seeing our parents respond to events with anxiety and worry may make it more likely that we will respond the same.

Anxiety arising out of experience later in life

Experiencing particularly upsetting events later in life can develop anxiety disorder over the short-run and, in some cases, for long period of time. Examples of this include the trauma caused by rape or war combat.

Our thought process is sometime responsible for our anxiety

Often, we are worried by our own thinking. Logical errors are common among people with anxiety problems, namely overestimating the danger in a situation and underestimating one’s ability to handle. Anxious people may always exaggerate the negative aspect of an event. They may have dilemma in sorting out what actually is unsafe in life.

Effect of drug and illness on anxiety

A variety of drugs, legal and illegal, set off the anxiety alarm, as do some medical or other psychiatric illnesses.

Dilemma within us as a cause of anxiety

Some of us become anxious when confronted with wearisome dilemmas—the lesser of two evils or the greater of two goods. Such a conflict may be based in unconscious alarms like disapproval by parents in childhood and that persist to impact us as adults. This kind of cause is referred to as “psychodynamic” because it addresses the conversations, or dynamics, that occur inside us.