Symptoms of Anxiety Disorders

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. David Thomas. I'm a Practicing Psychotherapist with the Whitford Thomas Group in Tampa, Florida; here to discuss the symptoms of anxiety. When we talk about anxiety before we kind of go into the symptoms; let's, let's look at what creates anxiety. I think many people believe that external events create the anxiety. But interestingly the perpetuator is ourselves. It's, it's our thinking that more directly influences anxiety symptoms. We use, in, in in my office cognitive behavior psychotherapy as an approach to help people to challenge and dispute the thinking that drives the anxiety. When we look at the thinking that drives the anxiety, we really want to look at the tendency for individuals to look into their future. You cannot experience anxiety in the present; it's always in context to the future. And so we build a story in the future; we give it a bad ending; we catastrophize or awfulize about it and then our tendency is to somehow believe or not going to be able; not going to be able to cope or deal effectively with that anxiety. So thinking really drives that anxiety. Now what are the symptoms that oftentimes associate with the anxiety? Well, when we think about anxiety, we think about kind of a, a heighten self. So the, the body seems to get really juiced up. So we will see heart palpitations; we see perspiration; headaches; muscle aches; we tend to see behaviorally isolation, avoidance; from a thinking feeling standpoint, we tend to have the sense of doom; that kind of the world is in ending, so to speak. We don't have a sense that we're going to be able to cope effectively. Other symptoms associated with anxiety can sleep disorders, eating issues; some people escalate their drinking intent to increase their drinking because alcohol for all practical purposes does medicate the system. So those are a lot of the symptoms associated with anxiety. But certainly important for you to recognize that thinking drives that. Well hopefully this information I provided you regarding the, the signs and symptoms of anxiety has been helpful. From Tampa, Florida, I'm Dr. David Thomas."