Depression vector created by pch.vector - www.freepik.com and Inkscape.org
People with anxiety perceive the world differently—their brain lumps both safe and unsafe things together and labels them all unsafe.
— Fact (@Fact) September 11, 2022
The last post, was a very short; I talked about worry in anxiety and how much it affects their daily living. We chose to stick with a post from NIMH because all the other posts had to do with worry and anxiety and I got to find out that that is a separate topic. NIMH focused mostly on generalised anxiety. In Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), there is a constant state of worry.
In GAD
- Symptoms start around age 30.
- Worry is excessive
- Difficulty going to bed
- Difficulty paying attention
- Easily frightened
- Common in woman
In children the worry is centred around war sports activities and the health of loved ones.
Depression vector created by pch.vector - www.freepik.com and Inkscape.org
one of the most relatable things about anxiety that taylor swift has ever written pic.twitter.com/V7ah5iqcvu
— veronica (@soitfuckingoes) September 13, 2022
In this post, I want to talk about the @fact post I saw. Well to make things clear I did an advanced search to bring this out. I was running dry with anxiety posts, people don't naturally talk about anxiety readily, and last month was a little easier to find content to react to. But the advanced search option is a development that has come to stay.
As regards the caption, I wanted to know just how distorted the reality of anxiety is. I know of this symptom in schizophrenia but this is the first time I am reading about a distorted perception in anxiety.
This is the Medic Vibes blog, where we share information about mental health-related topics with one another. Welcome, and I hope you're having a good day. @ebingo, the blog's host, is a physician and an illustrator. Because we currently only have one writer and illustrator on staff, we have not yet switched to our primary blog. Right now, we are writing blogs for the STEMsocial community. We discussed depression last month, and this month is all about anxiety. Similar to this month, we began last month with a Nigerian study that revealed anxiety was 50% common in a youth camp. We began examining tweets after the study like we did last month.
In Anxiety, there are higher levels of worry and fear than in the general population, Everyone can be affected by anxiety, but women and younger people are more likely to be affected.
In a study we looked at, we found that 50% of the campers on a youth camp in Northwestern Nigeria had symptoms of anxiety and about 1% of the Nigerian population deals with it while over 3% in the world deal with it too.
Everyone has, at some point in their lives, felt their heart race before important exams, presentations, or performances. What if I told you, however, that some people experience that feeling every day? People who suffer from social anxiety disorder worry constantly about what other people will think of them. One of these people, such as their boss or a coworker, maybe someone they interact with every day. As a result, people will use avoidance strategies. We examined how social anxiety in people can manifest during phone calls in one of our earlier posts.
Physical, psychological, and reactionary symptoms are all present in anxious people.
Physical symptoms include things like chest pain, stomach pain, weakness, rapid breathing, and a rapid heartbeat. These are frequently brought on by sympathetic firing in the autonomic nervous system.
Some of the psychological signs of anxiety include insomnia, nightmares, and flashbacks.
One of the reactionary symptoms that can accompany social anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder is avoidance. This can be of places and people.
The trigger for anxiety changes from one topic to another and lasts for longer than six months, according to the diagnostic and statistical manual. Controlling it can be challenging. Children with anxiety often experience pain, exhaustion, jitteriness, and sleep problems, one of which is constant.
Risk Factors
With Anxiety disorders, when it comes to who can suffer from the condition, it is a little bit of genetics and a little bit of the environment.
Being shy, tending to avoid social situations, or staying away from certain places are all behavioural traits that raise a person's risk of anxiety.
As a child, being exposed to traumatic or extremely stressful events increases the likelihood of developing anxiety.
If a person has family members who struggle with anxiety disorders, they are also at risk.
An individual's risk of developing anxiety disorders is increased by several medical conditions, including thyroid problems and heart conditions like arrhythmias.
In general, if you're a woman, your chances of experiencing anxiety are higher. Higher testosterone levels may have a calming effect, according to some researchers, while others believe this is due to hormonal changes that take place during the monthly menstrual cycle. Some people think that therapy for anxiety is less common for women.
Because depression and anxiety are linked, and because depression raises a person's risk of suicide, it is crucial to be alert for any changes as soon as they manifest.
Anxiety and Perception
People illustrations by Storyset
For this post I will be looking at Transformation, they are a big advocate for TMS therapy. In their post
A Distorted Reality? How Anxiety Alters Our Perception of the World Around Us
they explain the story of revolutionary psychology and how anxiety has served humans while evolving. According to this post, a lot of the perceived reality has to do with generalisation.
Image by brgfx on Freepik
Right now I feel that they are going down the same line with the tweet.
They paraphrased a science daily study explaining how identifying a feeling that is safe or non-threatening is difficult.
In the study, the sound was the stimuli and some sounds were neutral while other sounds were made to be linked with emotional events, particularly threats of financial loss or gain.
There were 3 sounds given and explained to this group first. These 3 sounds meant either gain, loss or neither.
After the 3 sounds were played and explained, they were given the incentive of receiving rewards if they were able to identify either of the 3 sounds amount 15 different sounds.
Over generalisation happened in the anxious group when they assumed that one of the sounds heard was either associated with gain or loss.
Over generalisation is a behavioural trait in often negative feelings and collectively viewed and analysed with similar experiences.
Since there is no discrimination between experiences, people who have anxiety can feel one way and not change their feelings as situations change. Therefore they are stuck feeling a type of way in every situation regardless of how unconnected it was with the trigger.
When Magnetic Resonance Imagining studies are done, the basic difference in people who are dealing with anxiety is that amygdala (a part of the brain responsible for handling fight and flight) is overactive.
People illustrations by Storyset
Another aspect that is affected is anxiety attention. The reason for this is that as we evolved we grew to pay attention to threats specifically for our good. So anything, person or movement that resembles this threat, we tend to pay more attention to them.
In anxiety disorders there is an increase in this mechanism, leading to a constant fear of threats and this leads to an inability to pay attention.
Tips
Image by DCStudio on Freepik
I will be giving two helpful tips, today. Well, one isn't really a tip it's just information about TMS.
Reading and learning about this condition and knowing how it affects you can be very helpful. At least you know that it's the condition that is having its effect and you can try to make modifications if you can't.
TMS stands for Transcranial Magnetic Imaging, it is a form of therapy that is not harmful. It is similar to MRI in that it uses magnetic waves. In MRI, the waves are used for imagining but in TMS it is used for stimulation.
It is usually used for depression, but it can be used for anxiety disorders.
Read more about it here.
Hive Stories
@hectorfaria1 talks about dance therapy and explains how this can be useful in the management of stress and depression. He also puts it perfectly explains that dance is a conversation between music and our bodies.
This post takes me back to my days when I did fitness training in medical school. I know how it felt back then...and I have a feeling of how it feels now.
Check out his post here
Questions
- What did you learn about anxiety?
- What did you learn about the perception of anxiety?
- What ways can you help with this condition?
Conclusion
In anxiety, the perception in changes in two key ways. The first is that the ability to distinguish between threatening situations is altered and the feeling goes on even after the stimulus. The second is that the ability to identify threatening situations is also altered so the attention is also hard to focus.
I hope that you learned a lot from this post.
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