![]() Left untreated, those anxieties can go on for months and years. Sometimes, especially in the case of OCD, it takes just a single traumatic event - a genuinely embarrassing social moment, say, or a legitimate medical scare - for the brain to establish a fixed fear. Ditto an obsessive-compulsive fear of disease or a panic over separation or loss. Once you’ve decided that people at parties are probably judging you, your brain may lock that lesson in and pretty soon generalize it to any social encounter. But the anxious brain sometimes learns the wrong things and has an awfully hard time unlearning them. “In the context of a disorder, however, you might start to feel the same thing the moment you walk into the office or a party.”Īn anxious brain, like a non-anxious brain, is always learning. ![]() “If you suddenly have to slam on your brakes and swerve to avoid a collision, that pounding heart and rapid breath you feel for a few minutes after is a form of panic attack,” says psychologist Anne Marie Albano, director of Columbia University’s Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders. In some cases, the emotions become so severe they lead to a panic attack, a sort of weaponized anxiety that hits fast and hard and includes such symptoms as dizziness, rapid heart rate, depersonalization or out-of-body experience and a fear of losing control or dying. “There are students who will vomit in the days leading up to a test.” “Anxiety will prevent people from sleeping they’ll find themselves crying over it,” says psychologist Golda Ginsburg, professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and a specialist in child and adolescent mental health. If the tension consumes your day, however, if it crowds out other thoughts or if the psychic pain goes from troubling to severe, that’s another matter. And if you have a particular sensitivity - flying, dentists, working the room at a crowded party - you’re going to be tense as one of those situations approaches. ![]() It’s one thing to be jittery before an important test or presentation or to worry about your health when an epidemic is in the news.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |