I would like to provide you with more information about Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
There are differences between the different Anxiety Disorders even though they all come from the same root cause. People are individual and so feelings and symptoms manifest in different people in different ways. There are though, simple differences between say Panic Disorder and Generalised Anxiety Disorder that make them easier to tell the difference apart.
Panic Disorder is “Fear of Fear”
Generalised Anxiety Disorder is “Worry about worry”
Generalised Anxiety Disorder causes you to spend a huge amount of time worrying about different subjects, in fact once you gain control over one subject of your worry, it will quickly be replaced by another subject. This is typical of Anxiety which always manifests in different ways once you have overcome each worry or fear as that is it’s way of keeping you stuck.
It can feel very frustrating and exhausting never being able to switch off your worries. People suffering Generalised Anxiety Disorder can often feel like a prisoner to their own mind, never feeling they have control over their thoughts.
If you suffer with this you will find yourself a lot of the time in an internal argument with yourself and you fear your thoughts. You spend a great deal of time worrying about “what if” thoughts and creating fearful scenarios in your head about what might happen as a result of your worrying. “What if” become two very significant words in your vocabulary.
An example of the type of thinking typical of Generalised Anxiety Disorder is that there is a great deal of time spent worrying about say a loss of job, but then you worries may switch from the loss of job to the amount of time you are spending worrying about possible loss of job, you will focus on the worry and then become really concerned that you cannot stop it and start asking yourself things like “what if all this worry causes me to have a nervous breakdown or a heart attack with all the strain or worse?”
So you see you begin to “worry about worry” which is what this is all about.
Generalised Anxiety Disorder does have some other symptoms too such as muscle aches and pains, shaking and trembling, sleep difficulties, irritability, low mood and Depression and Derealisation (feelings of not being here).
It really seems to be a condition of doubt, doubt that something bad may happen and it this awful thing that may happen must be stopped at all costs.
The problem is that in life it is impossible to prove beyond all doubt that something won’t happen, even when the chances are really slim that is the case for everyone in every situation in life. Of course things “could” happen, but that doesn’t mean that they will. No amount of worrying about it will change some outcomes in life but because there is always a possibility that the feared outcome could happen it sets the stage for the cycle of worry to take hold and there is no end to this worry and that is the problem. The more you fixate the more you worry and the more you worry the more you worry about worrying!.
Fearful thoughts are just symptoms of Anxiety and nothing more, they are just all the “spaghetti” that makes up the bigger Anxiety cycle. They can’t hurt you and do not mean the worst will happen in your future. No one can see into their future, we only have the here and now and that can change.