Generalised Anxiety
General Anxiety, also known as GAD, is the most common and widespread type of anxiety.Characteristically General Anxiety sufferers have relentless, unspecified worry about everyday things. The person with General Anxiety expects the worst to happen, believes their expectations to be true and then act upon their beliefs, by avoiding whatever provokes the anxiety. Chronic worry affects every aspect of life.
A General Anxiety condition is something that sets into us, we are not born with it. When we have anxious thoughts, they trigger feelings of anxiety/discomfort which we then we then act upon to avoid feeling anxious.
The behaviour we implement to ease the anxiety (double checking, not going out, not asking a question, etc.) in the short term helps our anxiety, but in the long term keeps us trapped in the anxiety.
General Anxiety typically leaves sufferers awake at night and unable to handle small things in life that once seemed normal. This is down to an increasingly negative level of appraisal of what’s going on. This is can be returned to normal again. General Anxiety is also common among people with panic disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders. General Anxiety naturally chokes up our resources and leaves us exhausted, it can trigger depression when we are suffering with it over time.
Generalised Anxiety
When a problem with anxiety develops it takes our perfectly natural evolutionary defence system and hijacks it so that we become generally anxious, socially anxious, phobic, obsessive compulsive, traumatised after an event (PTSD) or suffer from sudden panic attacks.
Check out our blog post on how CBT helps for General Anxiety. Our therapists who work with general anxiety are Michael Ledden, Tara Morrissey, Aoife Doyle, Sean Thunder, Stephen Keogh, Elaine Garrigan and Sinead O’Hare.
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Getting Help
Thousands of people in Ireland suffer in silence with many kinds of difficulties yet general anxiety is probably one of the most widespread issues. General anxiety doesn’t become a huge debilitating problem overnight but over time it digs itself into us so that we’re paralysed. Often when we really notice it, it has really set in and we can feel like we’ve gone crazy. Early intervention or even crisis intervention counselling/psychotherapy is way of giving sufferers back control over their thoughts and ultimately how they feel. Anxiety Ireland has a team of psychotherapists on standby to assist you in taking back control of these problems. Our network of counsellors are working in person in some locations but also online, so they can be free to reach you where you are located.
Symptoms
- NOT BEING ABLE TO SLEEP
- FEELING CONSTANTLY ON EDGE
- DIFFICULTY CONCENTRATING
- IRRITABILITY
- FEELING OUT OF CONTROL
- INCESSANT NEGATIVE AND ANXIETY PROVOKING THOUGHTS
- TENSE MUSCLES
- LOW ENERGY AND TIREDNESS
- MAGNIFYING SMALL EVENTS OUT OF PROPORTION
“It felt like I was seeing the world in black and white… like I was wearing dark glasses that constantly cast a shadow on everything I could see. All the colour and happiness in my life had been sucked away by the GAD and depression which had consumed my life. I felt like I could never break free and that I would be stuck in this miserable existence for the rest of my life.”
Anonymous
“I thought I was going mad. No one else around me seemed to understand what I was going though. I felt so alone. I couldn’t seem to stop worrying about everything. I knew in my head it didn’t make sense, but nothing I could do would stop the thoughts that kept coming into my head and driving me crazy.”
Anonymous
“For me anxiety feels like a fear that I’m gonna mess up. Fear that I won’t be able to equal what others do with ease (looks like they do it with ease anyway!). An irritable kind of feeling… fearing that I’m not going to be able to handle things. This made me feel things must be a certain way or going right. If not, I get out of my comfort zone and am therefore in a ‘un-safe zone’.”
Anonymous