How Does Anxiety Develop Into An Anxiety Stress Disorder?

There are a couple of theories out about anxiety stress disorder and they are split into Psychoanalytical theory and Learning theory.

Psychoanalytical theory

Some of the best of the psychoanalysts believe that the mind is made up of different components called the conscious part and the subconscious part, and it is the conscious part which deals with fears and desires and it is also believed that if these fears and desires are too much to cope with in the conscious mind that they get buried away in the subconscious mind rather than dealing with them.

It is these buried away fears that can manifest themselves as anxiety as they have not gone away but merely been put somewhere out of the way, so when this fear expresses itself again it is presented as anxiety.

The Learning theory

This theory says that the anxiety is a fear that has simply been attached to the wrong stimulus or in other words we learn to be scared of the wrong things and react in an appropriate manner for the fear and it is this that soon becomes a habit and continues to cause anxiety.

This is very apparent when someone has a panic attack or fear of something and it goes into a vicious circle of anxiety. The panic attack starts out of the blue and people think they are having heart problems due to the severity of the palpitations and tight chest. This makes the heart beat even faster as they worry about their condition, this makes them think that they do really have a heart problem and so on a vicious circle of ever increasing anxiety when in fact the symptoms are normal and will go away with proper breathing and relaxation techniques.

Fear can do the same thing if uncontrolled. A good example is spiders, people who fear spiders will not go near one or look at one and all this does is to make the spider even more mysterious and even more frightening to them. This ultimately leads to them being even more anxiety provoking by not confronting the fear and looking or touching a spider.

By running away from the spider or in fact any other fear all it does is to increase the fear in another way. By running away all you do is to teach yourself two things.

1. The spider (or other fear) causes you anxiety

2. You must run away in order to control your anxiety

All you are doing is teaching yourself that being afraid of spiders is inevitable and there is nothing you can do about it when in fact you can control it by confronting your fear of spiders or whatever fear it is and not run away from it. Running away only makes the fears grow and it stops you taking control of it.

We often learn this fear from early in our childhood when we see other family members becoming anxious and fearful when they see a spider for instance. We then as children get lodged into our minds that spiders are to be feared and every time we see a spider these notions of fear come back to us and we have the same anxious feelings as our family members did when we were children. If the child runs away or lifts their legs up so the spider cannot get to them then again this reinforces two lessons for the child.

1. Spiders cause fear

2. Avoiding the spider gets rid of the fear.

Sometimes we fear things because of an accident or a chance happening, falling off a bike for example makes a person anxious when they get back on it again, a car accident can have the same effect on a driver and some people never get back into a car again after an accident.

Again this only serves to reinforce two lessons.

1. By using the bike, car or whatever it is you are telling yourself that they provoke anxiety in you and

2. By avoiding using them again the anxiety will go away

If you do not in these sorts of cases get right back on the bike or get back behind the wheel of the car again quickly the fear of doing it will be so strong that you may never get on the bike or drive the car ever again. By facing your fears you stop them growing.

Agoraphobia sufferers get panic attacks when in crowds and go home because of this and feel safe there. They link being outside with anxiety or a panic attack and they teach themselves that staying indoors away from crowds makes them symptom free.

We make our fears worse by not confronting them and sometimes this can make things worse for example in the case of agoraphobia a person may ask you to accompany them outside and you do this because you think that it is helping them.

It then gives the person suffering from agoraphobia the feeling that they cannot go out unless you accompany them. In effect they have learned that in order to go out they need help which is not true they just need to confront their fear themselves.

The lessons learned in this article can help anxiety from becoming an anxiety stress disorder by simply looking at your fears and what makes you anxious and confronting it instead of placing it in the subconscious mind out of the way festering.