Everyone has experienced fear at some point in their life. For those of you who have given in to your fears and anxieties, we want you to know that you are not alone. In order to overcome fear, you must learn to push through it, not avoid it. Listen as we ask the tough questions about the impact fear can have on our lives.
Stress and anxiety are normal, useful emotions but they can be hard to manage
Stress is a physical reaction by your body that is perfectly normal. In fact, stress is essential! That’s what gives you the energy to study for your exam or the motivation to pass your driving test. But if it builds up, it can affect you.
Anxiety is the tendency to create stress for yourself, to exaggerate it, or be scared of it right from the very first signs. For example, starting high school may make you anxious: what if you don’t make any friends?
Generalized anxiety disorder
When you suffer from a generalized anxiety disorder, you worry excessively, uncontrollably, and constantly for at least six months. Practically everything makes you anxious: family, friends, school, health, etc. You feel serious, undesirable impacts on your life every day, both in your general activities and in your relationships with friends or family.
Symptoms
People who have generalized anxiety disorder feel tired and irritable, they might have sleep problems, headaches, nausea, shakes, excessive sweating, and/or muscle pain. They find it hard to concentrate, or even breathe. They need air!
Panic disorder and agoraphobia
In a panic attack, you have a feeling of terror for a few minutes, accompanied by intense physical symptoms, such as racing heart and difficulty breathing. The frequency and intensity of attacks vary from one person to the next but they always have a huge impact on the life of a person with this disorder. People with a panic disorder start worrying about the next attack, to the point where it can affect their normal functioning in all areas of life.
Thus, panic disorder is sometimes accompanied by a specific phobia: agoraphobia. This fear of public spaces is mainly due to the fact that the person is scared of having an attack or not being able to get out of the situation easily.
Symptoms
They start suddenly and often unpredictably. You might feel heart palpitations (racing heart), excessive sweating, hot flashes, a tight feeling in your chest, a sense that you’re suffocating, trembling, a feeling of loss of self-control (you feel like you’ve lost your head ), etc. You might even think you’re dying...
Post-traumatic stress disorder
When you live through a dangerous situation (for example, a traffic accident), you feel a very high level of anxiety and fear... and it’s fully justified! The increase in adrenalin, the hormone that allows us to react quickly to danger, creates an intense physical reaction, which is useful in those conditions. In general, a few hours after the event, the adrenalin, and fear disappear. The danger is over.
In people who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the body keeps experiencing the same physical sensations, with the same intensity, long after the dramatic incident, in the form of dreams or flashbacks. It’s literally a nightmare!
Symptoms
Although symptoms usually appear in the first three months after a trauma, they may sometimes appear months later, or even a few years after the fact. The most common symptoms of PTSD include sleep and concentration problems, intense fear, a feeling of powerlessness, heart palpitations, rapid breathing, shakes, chills, uncontrollable thoughts that cause distress or depression, and difficulty feeling certain emotions, such as affection or sexual desire.
The two kinds of phobias
Specific phobia
This is a fear associated with a specific object or situation. The person is terrified, even though the danger isn’t real (or it’s not as critical as the person thinks). Common specific phobias include phobias of animals, insects, storms, heights, closed spaces, etc.
Social phobia
Social phobia is associated with social activities, where the person is afraid of feeling humiliated or preoccupied with what other people think of them. This can range from a fear of public speaking or going to a party to fear of leaving the house at any time.
Symptoms
In a situation, or when they think of that situation, the person with a phobia feels anxiety, including a variety of physical sensations: their heart may race, they may feel dizzy or get the shakes, they may start sweating, have a stomach-ache, get confused, etc.
Phobia is physical! Not everyone has a phobia, and just because you think spiders are gross, it doesn’t mean you have arachnophobia!
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Everyone has their little bad habits and actions they habitually repeat. For example, you might constantly check that the door is really locked after you take the key out of the lock.
For people with OCD, these actions become an obsession that’s impossible to control. The person will check several times in a row to make sure the door’s really locked when they know perfectly well it is. They just can’t help it!
Sometimes people develop serial compulsions. Then they need to repeat certain actions to get the obsession out of their mind. For example, people might repeatedly wash their hands, sometimes to the point of hurting themselves, to avoid catching diseases. Someone might also count objects compulsively every day in order to control (and limit) the ones they come in contact with.
So it’s not surprising that, in daily life, OCD means a huge waste of time for a person who has it, as well as causing serious psychological distress. The person knows his/her behavior is bizarre and unreasonable but can’t do anything about it. A person with OCD can’t behave the way he/she wants to at school or at home. The reason is simple: the obsessions and compulsions prevent him/her from functioning normally.
Symptoms
In most cases, the symptoms appear gradually and become more and more intense over time. There are all kinds of obsessions and compulsions. Here are some common obsessions:
intense fear of being contaminated by contacting an object or substance
fear of losing self-control or getting angry
fear of forgetting something important (for example, to lock the front door)
fear of forgetting or losing an object (for example, keys)
The most common compulsions involve:
washing one’s hands repeatedly, to the point of injury
taking several showers a day.
cleaning the house non-stop
checking that the doors are locked before going out or going to bed
spending a huge amount of time organizing and putting away household items
forcing oneself to take exactly the same route to get to school and always crossing the street in the same place
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