Understanding Anxiety and Worry

Understanding Anxiety and Worry

Anxiety can be characterized as a sense of dread or threat, often without any concrete evidence to support the feelings. It is a combination of cognitive, emotional and overt actions in reaction to some perceived future event, and believing it will occur in the worst possible way. The focus is often on some concern about personal performance that will result in failure, humiliation or embarrassment. Although it is normal to worry about performance or other situations, the worry can be managed. Anxiety can be intrusive, difficult to suspend, and effects daily living.
 
Anxiety ignores other possibilities or potentials, and suspends faith and trust.  It forces its believer into reactivity, catastrophizing, black and white thinking, which negates evidence for rational appraisals.

Understanding Anxious and Worry

Three dynamics give anxiety its potency for the client. First, there may be some percentage of truth in the person's anxious thinking. The probability of the anxious prediction occurring may be slight or it is one possibility out of other less negative ones. Anxious predictions negate positive reversals to negative events. Once the worst possible prediction has happened, nothing else can resolve the event. Secondly, the greatest focus is on the persons ability to deal with the negative event. Often this is the core problem of the anxious thinking. The person considers himself or herself unable to cope with or overcome the negative event. They will not recover, or the dread of the emotional response to the event seems too disturbing, too overpowering for the person to deal with the original problem. Third, the physical feelings, mental and bodily reactions of anxiety cause clients to give anxious predictions credibility.  Because the anxious physical reactions occur, and one feels so intense, these physical reactions are used as evidence that these predictions will occur, and that the client is helpless to resolve these events.  This defeatism is what makes anxiety a spiritual problem and an emotional one that the Bible says to avoid.

Understanding Anxious and Worry

Three dynamics give anxiety its potency for the person. First, there may be some percentage of truth in the person's anxious thinking. The probability of the anxious prediction occurring may be slight or it is one possibility out of other less negative ones. Anxious predictions negate positive reversals to negative events. Once the worst possible prediction has happened, nothing else can resolve the event. Secondly, the greatest focus is on the persons ability to deal with the negative event. Often this is the core problem of the anxious thinking. The person considers himself or herself unable to cope with or overcome the negative event. They will not recover, or the dread of the emotional response to the event seems too disturbing, too overpowering for the person to deal with the original problem. Third, the physical feelings, mental and bodily reactions of anxiety cause clients to give anxious predictions credibility.  Because the anxious physical reactions occur, and one feels so intense, these physical reactions are used as evidence that these predictions will occur, and that the client is helpless to resolve these events.  This defeatism is what makes anxiety a spiritual problem and an emotional one that the Bible says to avoid.

Understanding and Identifying Anxiousness

The psychologically anxious person is not concerned with unrealistic harm or contamination, as with obsessive compulsiveness, the predictions do not result in a panic attack. The anxious predictions do not cause extreme avoidance of the anxiety producing situation, as in social phobia, or some specific circumstance such as in agoraphobia.  Some anxiety related disorders focus on a specific situation such as being away from home in Separation Anxiety, fearing a improbable serious illness with a diagnosis of Hypochondriasis, or inventing physical complaints such as in a somatization disorder. General Anxiety is not specific to a single event or concern that falls in the aforementioned problems.  Anxiety will exist along with these other diagnoses, though.  Generalized Anxiety would be different from an Adjustment Disorder, which has a significant event that has occurred, and three months later an anxious functioning persists to a level where it is effecting the persons daily living.