What are the most harmful effects of anxiety disorders?
This is an extremely relevant question in this fast paced world. It is a fact that life has become highly demanding and many people have become incompetent to absorb the stress and strain involved with their busy schedules and hectic tasks. When you experience stress for a prolonged period, you become extremely vulnerable to anxiety disorders.
Moderate amount of stress does not develop any harmful effects but higher stress levels result in a wide range of health complications. Various studies show that anxiety disorders adversely affect your physiological, psychological and emotional health and when these disorders remain untreated for an extended period, you also become vulnerable to various critical health issues.
Anxiety disorders lead to a wide variety of physical health issues. Two critical aspects can be linked with stress response and they include challenge perception and automatic psychological reaction called fight or flight response. Prolonged stress and anxiety activate the fight or flight response continuously and this condition triggers the release of different stress hormones including cortisol by the sympathetic nervous system of your body.
Continuous release of stress hormones keeps your blood sugar and triglycerides at an elevated level. Triglycerides can be described as blood fats that are being utilized by the body for fuel. Higher blood sugar and triglyceride levels lead to physical reactions like irregular heartbeat, dizziness, muscle tension, physical fatigue, twitching and trembling, sweating, shortness of breath, irritability, nausea, difficulty in swallowing, muscle ache, headache and dry mouth as well.
Anxiety disorders encourage excess fuel creation by producing increased amount of hormones in the human body. When this fuel is not properly utilized for physical activities; you become extremely susceptible to critical health issues like stroke, heart attack, high blood pressure, suppression of the immune system, weight gain, digestive disorders and premature coronary artery disease as well. These aspects clearly suggest that anxiety disorders create serious negative effects on your digestive system, cardiovascular system, excretory system and respiratory system as well.
Poor mental health can always be associated with anxiety disorders. Your mind becomes a congenial breeding space for negative thoughts and concentration lapses adversely affect your ability to perform official as well as daily personal tasks. These types of disorders also lead to short term memory loss and other types of memory-related difficulties and you also have to deal with depressive symptoms like poor appetite, lethargy, lack of interest and hopelessness.
Chronic anxiety also results in an incorrect cognitive appraisal of a given situation and over a period, you will start overestimating the amount of threat in a particular situation. Eventually, all these problems lead to depression and your mental health comes down drastically.
You should be emotionally stable if you want to succeed in this fiercely competitive world. Anxiety disorders invite a wide variety of emotional discomforts and they include fear or terror, distress, feeling overwhelmed, uneasiness, jumpiness or edginess, apprehension, nervousness, panic feeling and much more. All these negative emotions create an adverse impact on your social life and over a period, you will start avoiding interacting with people.
Medical practitioners including psychologists unanimously agree with the fact that anxiety disorders create serious physical, behavioral, cognitive and emotional impacts. You will miss out excellent social and professional opportunities due to social anxiety and, the fear of asserting yourself also invites dysfunctional relationships.
The most prominent effect of anxiety disorders is depression and chronic depression develops suicidal tendency in people. Other common anxiety related discomforts that reduce your quality of life include drug addiction, alcoholic addiction and teeth grinding and. Consequently, your productivity comes down in a significant manner.
Those people, who are biologically predisposed to anxiety along with psychological vulnerability, are most likely to develop anxiety disorders. Various research studies clearly convey that four psychological variables predict psychological vulnerability to anxiety and they include cognitive beliefs, cognitive distortions, cognitive appraisals and perceived control.
When you plan to fight against anxiety, you should be mindful of these critical aspects and it always helps you develop a systematic and result oriented treatment plan to get rid of anxiety disorders.
Share
