Anxiety Symptoms

Anxiety manifests itself as physical tension, apprehension, uneasiness, fidgeting, fatigue, sleep disturbance, a lack of concentration, negative thinking, perspiration, nausea, elevated heart rate, and muscle tension.  These symptoms remain even if the person logically knows that there is no real danger (Durand & Barlow, 2003).

Anxiety Disorders

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is characterized by constant, intense, and uncontrollable worries about everything.  These worries are accompanied by tenseness, irritability, fatigue, and restlessness.  GAD is not only distressing for the people affected by it, but also for everyone around them (Durand & Barlow, 2003).
   

• Panic Disorder is characterized by recurrent unexpected panic attacks, constant worries about having additional panic attacks, and changes in behavior related to the attacks.  Common panic attack symptoms are heart palpitations and pounding, sweating, trembling, shaking, shortness of breath, feeling of choking, chest pain, nausea, abdominal distress, dizziness, feeling lightheaded, feelings of unreality, fear of losing control, fear of going crazy, fear of dying, numbness, tingling sensations, chills, and hot flushes (American Psychiatric Association, 2004).
   

•  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is characterized by persistent re-experiencing of traumatic events involving near-death, serious injury, intense fear, and helplessness in the form of distressing recollections, thoughts, dreams, flashbacks, and strong physiologic reactions to even remotely associated stimuli, leading to difficulty sleeping, irritability, and hyper-vigilance.  Social and occupational functioning are severely impacted (Durand & Barlow, 2003).
   

• Social Anxiety Disorder/Social Phobia is characterized by persistent and unreasonable fear of humiliation or embarrassment when exposed to unfamiliar people.  Therefore, the situation is avoided completely or endured with intense anxiety, which interferes with the person’s normal functioning (Durand & Barlow, 2003).
   

• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterized by distressing recurrent or persistent thoughts or impulses that are considered inappropriate (obsessions) and repetitive physical or mental behaviors to act out an obsession (compulsions).  These thoughts and behaviors are excessive, unreasonable, time-consuming, and interfere with relationships (Durand & Barlow, 2003).
   

• Specific Phobias are characterized by an excessive, unreasonable, and persistent fear of a specific object or situation that causes immediate fearful responses, anxiety, and distress when being encountered.  Some of these phobias may have some danger associated with them, however, not to the degree of the anxiety experienced.  Physical responses (sweating, dizziness, and heart palpitations) as well as extreme fear are symptoms of various types of phobias (Durand & Barlow, 2003).   Common specific phobias include:

1.      Fear of Heights: While people have to be careful in a high place, a fear of heights causes extreme anxiety responses even when a person is safe, such as when looking out of a window or being secured by a banister.

2.      Fear of Flying may be a combination of a height phobia and claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces).  In addition to the symptoms mentioned above, negative thoughts and images of possible catastrophic outcomes can increase the fear even more.

3.      Fear of Driving may be a result of an accident of self or others or of a traumatic observation, and the symptoms are intensified by negative thoughts and images.  Furthermore, a fear of driving can lead to isolation and impact social and occupational functioning due to avoidance of the feared situation.

4.      Fear of Public Speaking is closely linked to fear of embarrassment and humiliation.  This fear is also intensified by negative thoughts about possible shameful experiences and it is related to social phobias.

Phobias and panic attacks often develop because of a traumatic experience.  However, they can also develop as a result of cumulative stress overwhelm.  In such a case, the person's coping capacity is exceeded by a combination of stressors.  In the moment of overwhelm, anxiety can become associated with whatever is present in the environment at the time (driving, flying, etc.).

Dealing with Anxiety

Anxiety can lead to avoidance of certain situations and stimuli, as well as unreasonable worry in everyday situations, and can therefore markedly impact a person’s life and relationships.  It can lead to negative thinking, a defeatist attitude, and health issues (such as hypertension, eating problems, headaches, and digestive problems), all of which can result in social isolation and depression.  This shows the crucial need for true anxiety relief.

Treatment for Anxiety

Minor tranquilizers have been used to treat anxiety, but with only moderate success.  Their side effects are considerable: impaired cognitive and motor functioning, as well as psychological and physical dependence.  A number of car accidents have been associated with the use of tranquilizers.  Therefore, this type of drug treatment is usually only recommended for short-term use and during extreme, stressful situations.  Antidepressants have also shown some moderate benefits for anxiety disorders, even without a mood disorder present, and they can be used for longer periods of time (Buck, 2008).  However, they also can cause a range of adverse side effects.  No one knows the long-term consequences of using many of these newer drugs.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on dealing with stressful situations and images by means of cognitive restructuring.  While its short-term success is moderate, similar to drug treatment, its long-term benefits are somewhat better, but clearly not optimal.  Moderate anxiety levels, restlessness, and worries appear to remain, especially in stressful situations.  Exposure treatments for systematic desensitization are another tool used in CBT, which can be imaginal (i.e. imagining stressful situations in the person’s mind) or in vivo (i.e. facing stressful situations in real life).  A relatively new form of exposure treatment is virtual reality exposure, where the person is presented images of stressful situations without having to use his or her imagination nor to experience it for real.  However, all types of exposure treatments result in merely moderate improvement (Whitney, Jacob, Sparto, Olshansky, Detweiler-Shostak et al., 2005).  Anxiety management treatment is a more structured approach that involves education, relaxation training, and exposure treatment, but no cognitive restructuring.  Its effectiveness is comparable to CBT.  A self-help approach to anxiety treatment is bibliotherapy and computerized CBT; however, if no improvement is noticed after six weeks professional help needs to be obtained (Buck, 2008).

Quick REMAP is an alternative approach that calms the person’s emotional and unreasonable but automatic and uncontrollable responses without relying on his or her logical “thinking brain”.  That part of the brain cannot be reached during extreme anxiety-provoking situations.  Therefore, the “emotional brain” has to be addressed first when emotional issues are treated.  Quick REMAP does just that.  It is a relatively brief and emotionally rather painless treatment that does not require the use of medication.  It uses evidence-based acupressure points to calm the emotional mid brain and to ease emotional distress first.  However, a change in the person’s thinking that results in a different perspective of anxiety-provoking situations can also be observed, at times, very rapidly.  Quick REMAP has provided striking and quick results in overcoming anxiety, unreasonable worries, fears, behaviors, and specific phobias, and they tend to be long lasting. 

Anxiety Relief

As mentioned above, a number of treatment approaches involve systematic desensitization (one of the most common treatments for anxiety) that makes the person focus on stressful situations in order to learn to literally endure the fear, to get habituated, and to get desensitized gradually.  CBT, for example, works with images and a cognitive approach.  However, a person’s cognition is heavily impaired when experiencing anxiety.  But CBT does not have a tool to reduce the person’s emotional distress during the exercise, which limits its effectiveness considerably.  On the contrary, Quick REMAP focuses on the person’s emotional distress first before – if at all – applying logical cognitive content. At this time, this appears to be the most promising approach for true anxiety relief.

Before working through emotionally charged situations with Quick REMAP, the person needs to identify specific stressful events that need to be grouped according to various themes, situations or objects that cause his or her anxiety.  Then one cluster at a time can be worked on.  The person creates a hierarchical list of anxiety provoking situations for each cluster that will be dealt with from the least to the most stressful situation on the list.  However, rather than having the person endure each situation without any emotional help for longer periods of time, activating various acupuncture points dissolves his or her distress rapidly.  Using this process, the list can be tackled not only much faster than in traditional CBT, but also in a much less painful manner.  

After dissolving the emotional distress, the list can, if required, be approached cognitively in a much more effective manner because, as mentioned above, the thinking brain does not work effectively as long as the emotional charge is too intense.  However, Quick REMAP has often shown that with the resolution of the emotional charge no further cognitive treatment is in fact needed, because the perspective of the person towards the respective situations has already switched from viewing them as anxiety-provoking towards entirely neutral.  This is true anxiety relief that includes emotional healing and cognitive restructuring, both of which ensure long-term results. 

 

References

American Psychiatric Association (2004). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4^th ed., text revision). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.

Buck, A. (2008). Dealing with anxiety. Practice Nurse, 35(2), 34-37.

Durand, V. M. & Barlow, D. H. (2003). Essentials of abnormal psychology (3^rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth-Thomson Learning.

Whitney, S.L., Jacob, R.G., Sparto, P.J., Olshansky, E.F., Detweiler-Shostak, G., Brown, E.L. et al. (2005). Acrophobia and pathological height vertigo: Indications for vestibular physical therapy? Physical Therapy, 85(5), 443-458.

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