About Anxiety Symptoms

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. David Thomas. I'm a practicing Psychotherapist in Tampa, Florida with the Whitford Thomas Group. Today I'm going to speak to you about anxiety symptoms. When we talk about anxiety, we really look at; I mean anxiety as well as depression and anger and guilt is a very extreme negative emotions. We tend to call those four negative emotions kind of four blocks to happiness. When we look at anxiety as we do the other negative emotions, what we're really looking at two components to it. One, the thinking component which is the thinking that drives the anxiety and then the actual symptom of the anxiety which be the, kind of behavioral manifestations of that. Interestingly anxiety used to be a fairly adaptive emotion in primitive times; kind of the fighter flight mechanism what's important for survival of the species. Unfortunately today, or actually fortunately today, we all have saber-tooth tigers and oftentimes or not the fighting or fleeing for our life and so the symptoms today don't tend to be as adaptive. So when we look at the symptoms of anxiety, probably the thing we tend to know is that, the most, is just the physical discomfort anxiety. Oftentimes with anxiety we see a lot of muscle aches and a muscle tension. Also with anxiety because of the fighter flight mechanism, the body tends to rub itself up and so you'll get a, your heart tends to beat very fast, perspiration increases and as a result, the motor seems to be running very very fast. Other symptoms of anxiety would be the difficulty in concentrating, staying focused. Oftentimes with anxiety, we tend to avoid confrontation or just avoid things that we kind of view to be too hard. So those are certainly a lot of the symptoms associated with anxiety. The important thing to remember with anxiety as with all the negative emotions, it's driven by thought. So if you change your thinking, you change your feelings. I'm Dr. David Thomas speaking to you about anxiety symptoms."