How To Identify Stress And Anxiety?

Every human being is an emotional being. The levels of emotions may be high or low. But when that level is disturbed, you have stress and anxiety. The dividing line between these two negative tendencies is very thin. Your anxiety may be due to stress or your stress may be due to anxiety. Every stress and anxiety has a root cause to it. And the symptoms are the by products of such causes.

The first symptom of stress is that you are not a normal person, when you are seized with it. Your face will indicate what you are! They say the face is the mirror of the man. Your emotions will be disturbed and it will show up on your face.

You have a feeling that is difficult to explain. You have only questions, with no definite answers. If there are answers, they are multiple answers. You see several options before you, you see several paths before you, but unable to decide which one is yours. The worry and uncertainty of the failure haunts you. You are totally confused. All these are stress symptoms.

Further, with the feeling of anxiety your self-esteem is hurt and motivation is punctured. You feel that you have come to a dead end. It is a state of uneasiness that you are unable to explain with convincing reasons. You are a split personality. Your emotions are not responding to your reason. You begin to come to haphazard conclusions. Most importantly, you don't understand why you feel what you feel. The way you feel. You are facing some grim experiences and your attitude turns cynical. You feel that the human beings are ignoble. You feel that the whole world is ignoble!

To walk to your freedom from the levels of stress of anxiety, you need to walk from darkness to light, from the secret den to the open sun. The fire-brand personality within you has to bloom. There is nothing wrong in the situations around you. Everything is happening the way it should! At the moment you may feel that it is working to your disadvantage. Your present confusion is due to your wrong perception of matters, not due to the reality of the issue involved. You are unnecessarily seeing the serpent in the rope, due the surrounding darkness. When the light is thrown in that area, you see that it a piece of lifeless rope!

What could be the root causes of symptoms of your stress and anxiety? Whenever you make compromises with your deep core values and your present disposition, your harmony is disturbed. Similarly, when you are worried about your future, future of your children due to economic or social circumstances it makes you anxious.

The right attitude is to live life in its trials, tribulations duty and beauty. God has created you for a purpose, try your best to fulfill it, without any motivated fear! Destroy the negative feelings, before they sprout!

Anxiety, Depression and Defense Mechanisms

Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis, came up with his own theory of explaining the occurrence of anxiety and depression as part of human experience. His explanation of this phenomena traces its origin from the three divisions of the psyche. According to Freud, the human psyche is divided into the id, ego, and superego. These three divisions are only acquired eventually as a person also grows. To have a better understanding of the psyche and its three divisions, one should start with the world and its components.

The world is made up of numerous and different components, and one of those components is the human organism. A human organism has a special ability to survive and reproduce, his guiding force being his needs such as hunger, thirst, fear of pain and sex. It should be noted that these needs are part of a person's unconscious mind. A person's psyche is sensitive to these needs and transforms them into instincts, drives or wishes. This division of the psyche functions with a process called the “pleasure principle” and it is described as the id's responsibility to take care of the needs immediately. This behavior is mostly observed during infancy just like when a baby cries when it is hungry or thirsty. However, when a person's need is not satisfied by the id his or her need just becomes stronger. 

This need then enters  the  conscious mind which is associated to another division of the psyche. This part of the psyche is called the ego and it relates a person's consciousness or reality. This part of the psyche operates based on the “reality principle.” The reality principle is about the belief that the ego will respond to satisfy the need as soon as it finds the appropriate object to satisfy it. However, as the ego continuously responds to an organism's needs, it sometimes experiences obstacles against attaining its goals as well as things that assist it to attain the goals. The ego keeps track of these two types of factors, particularly the rewards and punishments that are given by two of the most influential persons in an organism's life, his or her parents. The records that the ego keep about obstacles to avoid and the strategies it must take are all passed onto the superego, the third division of a person's psyche. It is only when someone is around five or seven years old that this part of the psyche becomes complete.

The superego is divided into two subparts, the conscience and the ego ideal. The conscience is the internalization of the punishments and the warnings while the ego ideal is based on the rewards and positive models that a person had encountered. The superego, together with its subparts, communicate their own requirements to the ego through feelings such as shame, guilt, and pride. Because of the existence of the superego, a person also acquires a new set of needs as well as wishes. However, these new sets of needs are based on social rather than biological origins. These new wishes coming from the superego are sometimes in conflict with the wishes from the id, often leaving the ego overwhelmed or threatened.  

This overwhelmed and threatened feeling of the ego is where anxiety comes from. According to Freud, there are three kinds of anxiety. The first kind is called realistic anxiety and it takes the form of human fears which are consequences of threats from the physical world. The second one is known as moral anxiety and it is a result of the threat that the ego perceives from the social world. It usually takes the form of feelings such as guilt, shame, and fear of punishment. Finally, the third kind of anxiety is called neurotic anxiety and it is a result of the fear of being overwhelmed by the impulses from the id.

In order for the ego to deal with these threats without feeling overwhelmed, it sometimes unconsciously blocks the impulses or distorts them into more acceptable forms. This process of blocking and distorting is what Freud called a “defense mechanism.”

Defense mechanisms come in various forms. One mechanism in particular is called turning against self. This happens when a person feels negative impulses such as hatred, aggression, and anger towards others but displaces these impulses to one's self. This explains human emotions of inferiority, guilt, and depression. Depression, Freud further explains, actually results from anger that a person refuses to acknowledge.

As more and more people, nowadays, experience having problems with regards to their anxieties and depression, a better understanding of these concepts from a Freudian perspective can actually help in resolving it. According to Freud, resolution can only be achieved when a person is made aware of those experiences or ideas in the unconscious and therapy be directed to the root of the problems which are most likely rooted in the unconscious.

Causes Of Social Anxiety

Social anxiety or social phobia has many varied causes, including biological, psychological and social. However, each one may be intertwined so it is hard to specify exacting ones. Though it is not yet known if social anxiety is caused by a genetic disposition or something learned through family social conditioning, it does appear that it can run in the family.

The first group of causes include environmental and social. It is believed by some social phobia experts that it is possible to learn this from the environment in which you are in. It has been suggested that simply interacting and watching others with similar tendencies can be influential. Also, it is possible that overprotective and controlling parents may develop this in their children and fail to recognize the disorder in them because they too suffer from it and consider it to be perfectly normal. Others think that people may develop social phobias based on a negative childhood event, including bullying, public embarrassment and teasing. Such indicators include disfigurement, abuse (sexual and physical), neglect, speech impediments or conflicts within a family.

The second group of causes of social anxiety is thought to be due to psychological or emotional trauma experienced in childhood. The subsequent symptoms may be the direct result of unresolved traumatic experiences such as car accidents, abuse, relationship breakdowns, humiliation or even a natural disaster. The key elements of that are common amongst all people suffering anxiety as a result of traumas include an event or experience that was not expected, the person was not prepared for, and there was little if anything that the person could have done to have pretended it from occurring. However, such traumas can also run deeper, including a poor bonding between the major caregiver and the person during childhood. The person may well have not learned the skills needed to regulate calmness, self-soothing and focus during stressful events.

The third social anxiety cause is biological in nature, including biochemical reactions, the structure of the brain and the possibility of the disorder having been inherited genetically. In genetical inheritance, most researchers believe that the main part of the disorder is born out of inhibited behavior. Young babies with such a disposition are quick to show stress and fear of unfamiliar situations and people, and as they grow into teenagers and adults, their risk for getting social phobia increases. Also, studies have shown that it may also have something do with the section of your brain that controls fears (amygdale). Through CAT scans, doctors have found that people with this disorder have an excess amount of activity in the amygdale and too little in the prefrontal brain cortex. Biochemically speaking, more studies indicate that an imbalance in the serotonin levels in the brain, dopamine, GABA and neurotransmitters may be to blame.

The most common group that social anxiety disorder sufferers fall into is the second. Each and everyday, many people, young and old, experience traumas, some of which they may well put behind them for many years, or at least they believe, but somewhere inside of them, they have not learned to cope with the resulting trauma, but in fact pushed the emotional side ‘under the carpet’ or so to speak. When this happens it is essential to get medical support and treatment. Such traumas as abuse, rape and other experiences can develop from social anxiety to include even post-traumatic shock disorder, which can attack any person at any time in their lives. It may manifest itself many years later, even after the trauma has since been apparently forgotten.

Though there are many cause of social anxiety phobias, the bottom line is that the result is an unnatural fear of social interaction and a lowered self-esteem that can not only hinder a person’s ability to function in everyday situations, but in some cases hinder the person’s ability to simply live a normal existence outside of their home. Sometimes the disorder is so debilitating that the person cannot even carry on regular daytime activities. If you or anyone you suspect may have this disorder, there is no shame in asking for medical help. This does not have to be a lifelong affliction, nor is it normal because someone else you know is dealing with it by pushing it away. Your family doctor is your best source of relief in this regard.