3 Differences Between Worry and Clinical Anxiety
Anxiety is BIG. For individuals trying to overcome an anxiety disorder, anxiety can feel like facing a bear. Its impact on society is staggering. Here are the facts:
Over 40,000,000 adults in the US struggle with an anxiety disorder (18% of the US population of 321 million)
42 billion dollars are spent annually to deal with anxiety.
According to the AADA, people with an anxiety disorder are 6 times more likely to go to a mental hospital. (https://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics).
People with an anxiety disorder are 3 to 5 times far more likely to go to the doctor. That’s partly because one of the disorders primary consequences is somatic (body) symptoms. Anxiety isn’t just about worry. Its effects on the body are powerful.
Anxiety, also known as stress, is associated with heart disease, stroke, and hypertension. (Any cardiologist worth their salt will tell their patients to minimize stress.) For some individuals anxiety can be merely a pest they deal with occasionally. But for many people anxiety is a constant thorn in their side, or even debilitating.
Life in a First World War Zone
People all around the world struggle with anxiety, but researchers find that anxiety and out-of-control worry tend to impact people from “first world countries” like the US at significantly higher rates. In the US, people tend to be very busy, stress-driven, and have less time for healthy leisure activities and family time. To understand the way anxiety works, it helps to think of it as a hijacker. When functioning normally, our fear response system energizes us to fight or flee danger and then relaxes as quickly as possible. Anxiety, however, has the ability take over the system, causing the fear arousal switch to be stuck in the “On” position.
Are you a ‘Worry Wart’?
As a result, many people are continually keyed up and on edge. Living in a continual state of anxiety and worry is without a doubt bad for your emotional and physical health. Anxiety and feeling stressed when you’re facing a lot of demands is normal, and sometimes it helps give energy and focus to get things done.
Perhaps you would describe yourself as a ‘worry wart.’
Your body doesn’t necessarily distinguish between the fear response from say, a bear in the woods, and your intense apprehension about public speaking.
If you are a worrier, or perhaps you are stress-driven, you habitually use stress as a coping strategy all the time to get things done. It’s as if you and your body are continually fighting a dangerous enemy. It’s like you are living in a First World war zone.
Experiencing periodic stress and anxiety is normal, but you definitely don’t want to live there.
Clinical Anxiety vs Normal Anxiety
While everyone will experience unpleasant or intense anxiety sometimes, not everyone has an anxiety disorder. A professional who is trained to assess you for an anxiety disorder will investigate to what extent your life is impacted by your anxiety. Clinical anxiety disorders are the result of an unhealthy level of anxiety that impairs a person’s ability to live a normal and satisfying life for an extended period of time. When a person regularly experiences a level of anxiety that impairs their life, it may be time to seek professional help.
Symptoms of Clinical Anxiety
Many people don’t realize they have an anxiety problem because they don’t recognize the physical (“somatic”) symptoms. Anxiety often shows up in the body as:
body tension
muscle aches and pain
stomach and intestinal problems,such as GERD
low or excessive appetite
difficulty falling or staying asleep
The somatic symptoms of an anxiety disorder bring people to the primary care physician more frequently than the average person. Mental symptoms include:
difficulty concentrating
excessive worry that is out of proportion to the actual threat
ruminating thoughts (thoughts that get stuck in your head in a loop)
People with anxiety often report that they know they shouldn’t worry so much about areas of life such as school, work, family, health, etc, but they can’t help it. They may feel if they move past worrying about one thing they just find something else to worry about.
Treating Anxiety
The good news about anxiety disorders is that they are very treatable. The gold-standard treatment for anxiety, like depression, is a combination of medication and a behavioral- based therapy such as CBT. Even for people that aren’t diagnosed with a clinical disorder, anxiety can feel like a problem. If medication and/or psychotherapy are not an option for you currently, you may still significantly enhance your life through little education, self-reflection, and willingness to try new things.
Brian Abbott, LMSW, LMAC
Resolve - Counseling & Wellness
Prairie Village, KS