Everyone can experience anxiety, but when symptoms are overwhelming and constant — often impacting everyday living — it may be an anxiety disorder.
What does anxiety mean to you? Nervousness before a test? Driving down a dark highway and realizing you’re almost out of gas and it’s 35 miles to the next exit? Or does it mean breaking out in sweat as your muscles suddenly tighten and your heart rate quickens? You th...
When a person experiences two or more illnesses at the same time, those illnesses are considered “comorbid.” This concept has become the rule, not the exception, in many areas of medicine, and certainly in psychiatry. Up to 93% of Medicare dollars are spent on patient...
Sally explains through poetry how it feels to have social anxiety disorder.
Anxiety is a universal emotional and physical response to danger, stress, uncertainty or change. Anxiety serves a valuable purpose. It tells us to pay attention, be prepared, use precautions and look out for ourselves. It is a potentially life-preserving force. Even people...
Living with anxiety is one of the reasons I decided to pursue mental health and substance abuse counseling as my career. I want to help people that struggle with the deep, dark monsters known collectively as mental illness.
Most people have experienced anxiety at some point. Running late for an important meeting, getting ready before a date, speaking publicly for the first time—anxiety is within the scope of the human experience. In fact, it’s a perfectly normal reaction to stressful situa...
I was diagnosed as a teenager with generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety. Everything gave me anxiety: people, schoolwork, making decisions—it all made me panic. Over time, I learned strategies to handle my anxiety. Then I had kids. When I thought about becoming a...
Shame kept me silent for a long time, until the walls that concealed my secret finally crumbled under the weight it carried.
I repeat the same tiring ritual every morning. I take the dreaded first look in the mirror, check for odd bumps or any out-of-place sensations. I continue my scrutiny throughout the day, in a way that’s nearly impossible not to find something out of the ordinary. A razor ...
What is anxiety? It seems like I’ve been asked this question a million times. How do you explain something that you don’t fully understand yourself?
In some ways, I long for the days when I thought I was “just” anxious — when my anxiety simply fueled my perfectionism. Sure, I’d have plenty of late nights completing school projects at the last minute due to the weight of my own high expectations. But overall, it f...
Just imagine yourself doing daily routines and out of nowhere you feel panicky, anxious, your heart starts to race… This is what life with anxiety is like for me and many others.