How Do I Know If I Have Anxiety?

Worry is a normal part of all our lives. Everybody worries about work or children or a pending result of a medical test. So how do we know if worrying or a feeling of unease is more than just life adjustment? Generalized Anxiety Disorder is a treatable mental health diagnosis that involves worrying that is difficult or even impossible to control without help.  Here is a list of symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder:

1)  Excessive anxiety and worry about a variety of topics, events or activities. Worry occurs more often than not for at least 6 months and is excessive, even when there is nothing wrong. In adults, the worry can be about health, money, or everyday life circumstances. In children, the worry is likely to be about their abilities or the quality of their performance (i.e. school performance).

2)  The worry is very difficult to control and may shift from one topic to another. The worry can cause difficulty concentrating.

3)  The anxiety and worry are associated with at least three of the following physical or cognitive symptoms:

- Edginess, restlessness

-Tiring easily, feeling more fatigued than usual

-Irritability

-Increased muscle aches/soreness; increased heart rate.

-Trouble falling asleep, or staying asleep, or both

4)  The worry or anxiety cause significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

5)  The symptoms are not due to a physical issue such as substance abuse, medication, or a medical condition (such as a thyroid problem).

If you have several of these symptoms, or you just need to ask questions and explore your thoughts with someone, contact a mental health provider in your area. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is treatable with medication and/or counseling. If you are having thoughts of self-harm, please seek emergency help from your local hospital or an emergency care facility or call 911. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.  (Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder obtained from DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association)

Gayla Partin, LISW-CP, Counseling Sumter, LLC

How Our Thoughts Can Affect Our Feelings

There is a treatment commonly used by therapists called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short. Simply put, CBT helps people recognize unhelpful thought patterns. It’s about noticing what you are thinking instead of just thinking, thinking, thinking…

There are numerous online resources for CBT education and worksheets. I use one in my practice from the Psychology Tools website. It lists several unhelpful styles of thinking such as magnification or blowing things out of proportion, focusing more on mistakes than successes, using judgmental words with ourselves like “I should”, “I must”, or worrying about a future event we have no control over.

Try an experiment where you take a day or even an hour and observe your thoughts at regular intervals, particularly if you are feeling worried, anxious, or down. Notice what you are saying to yourself. Are you beating yourself up for something you wish you had done? Are you trying to figure out how something in the future is going to turn out, even though it’s something you cannot change or control? Are you thinking someone is upset with you although you have no evidence to indicate this is true?

If you find that you are thinking in these ways, just notice it. Don’t try to change it or “fix it”. That can be unhelpful too. Just noticing can help slow our thoughts, calm our body’s reaction to stress, and reduce unhelpful thinking patterns.

If you would like to learn more about CBT and how to use it to help slow down your anxious thoughts, contact a licensed therapist who is trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

 Gayla W. Partin, LISW-CP, Counseling Sumter, LLC, 2/23/2018

Uncertainty and Anxiety

Everybody has anxiety at one time or another. This is our body’s normal state of “fight or flight” when we need to react to a situation. But for some people the symptoms of anxiety (excessive worry, difficulty concentrating, feeling on edge, sleep problems, irritability) can occur when we don’t need them to. Clients report that anxiety causes increased heart rate, shallow breathing, or an uncomfortable feeling of discomfort in the throat or chest. Anxiety can feel like dread but there often isn’t an identifiable trigger for these feelings. For some people there may be a past traumatic event they haven’t worked through or something unresolved in a relationship that is causing these symptoms. For others it might be a problem coping with uncertainty.

Some time ago I ran across an article about a link between anxiety and uncertainty. I’ve shared it with many clients and they have all said they found the information helpful and could identify that they had trouble coping with uncertainty. I recently did more research on this and found numerous online resources. Julie Beck had a recent article in The Atlantic magazine. She said people would rather get an electric shock now, than to know they may be shocked later.

I’ve talked with people who were waiting on a health diagnosis who said something like “I want to know the bad news and have a plan to address it rather than to keep waiting.” Think about the stress of waiting to find out if you got the job you interviewed for versus knowing you did (or didn’t) get the job. We want to know versus not knowing.

So, what to do about coping with uncertainty? Notice what you are thinking. Are you expecting bad news? Are you turning the situation into a catastrophe? Are you terrible at waiting? You can do some self-talk and remind yourself that you are resilient and have gotten through stressful situations before. We all have things that are uncertain every day. And we can’t predict the future. Just thinking about how you react when things are uncertain and working on more acceptance of your inability to control reactions of others, outcomes, etc. can be helpful. If you worry more than you can tolerate, contact someone who can help you with resources for coping with anxiety.

Gayla Partin, LISW-CP, Counseling Sumter, LLC 1/29/2018