Loneliness can create overwhelming anxiety, and anxiety can reinforce loneliness. Ultimately we are on our own in life, and much of the perceived emptiness we can feel when alone can drive our struggle to be...
Tattoos and piercings have become fixtures of American culture. Various cultures across the world have used body modification for centuries. The roots of this behavior, culturally as well as psychologically, are deep. But most people...
Examples of self-mutilation are common extensions of masochism. You may have purposely cut or burned yourself; you may have purposely scarred your hands, wrists, arms, or legs as a result of self-mutilation. The movie The...
Sadism and masochism are commonly misunderstood to involve uniquely sexual behaviors. However, in their more everyday presentations, they help us to understand profound separation anxiety. Sadism and masochism house different sides of the same coin....
It seems that much of anxiety stems from a basic fear of being alone or being left by those close to us. This separation anxiety starts in childhood, as the child separates from his/her mother...
We know from laboratory research with rats and from common sense that external stress leads to anxiety. Stress comes in many types, including but not limited to overwork, inadequate sleep, single parenting, two-career marriages, transition...
Classically known as Alfred Adler’s term, “inferiority complex,” the fear of inadequacy characterizes much of human behavior and much of anxiety. Common manifestations of this fear include feeling short, childish, insufficient, not fully a man,...
In seeing anxiety as a disorder (e.g., “he has panic attacks” or “he suffers from obsessive-compulsive dis-order”), we miss other ways in which anxiety can shape a personality. This type of anxiety becomes more of...
Culture plays a role in the presentation of one’s anxious symptoms in the same way that an organism always responds to its particular niche. The creation of a common, socially accepted medium through which anxiety...
Shame and/or guilt go hand in hand with anxiety. These emotions are old, primitive lodestars in our development. It is commonly thought that guilt serves as a more evolved feeling than shame. Guilt has to...
We all resort to any manner of behaviors to deal with our anxiety. Generally speaking, these behaviors might be referred to as self-soothing. Some self-soothing behaviors serve more strategically than others. Some patients will choose...
The work of Daniel Goleman of Harvard University, best known for his book Emotional Intelligence, speaks to basic principles of emotional health. He and others view anxiety as one of the body’s primary emotions and...
It often seems that recurrent dreams correlate with one’s anxiety; nightmares invariably do. The anxiety dream I see the most involves tidal waves, which can reflect feeling flooded or drowned by emotion. The meaning of...
Insomnia is one of the beasts of anxiety. Sleeplessness leaves one feeling wasted, fatigued, desperate, and hopeless. Restoring someone’s ability to sleep can pro-vide immediate, immeasurable relief. The insomnia of anxiety goes beyond counting sheep....
To a neutral observer, the idea of choosing to have a panic attack makes no sense. As uncomfortable as panic attacks are, why would anyone choose to suffer in this manner? Learning the ins and...
We all commonly experience performance anxiety when taking a test, speaking in public, or acting on stage. Patients report all kinds of medical, physical, and psycho-logical symptoms, which range from sweating, nausea, and palpitations to...
This question demands both financial answers and human answers. Our country spends billions of dollars per year on the treatment of anxiety, which is the most represented and treated of all mental health problems. Over...
In their book, Why We Get Sick, Drs. Randolph Neese and George Williams10 address the question of anxiety’s greater evolutionary purpose. As discussed earlier, the anxiety system serves as a fight-or-flight system, designed for our...
People suffering from anxiety often fear they will be stigmatized, as do many with a wide range of mental experiences. Patients commonly feel they are weak for not being better able to manage their anxiety,...
As you might imagine, mankind has been anxious as long as mankind has been in existence. The actual word anxiety has as its root angst, German for fear. The word panic stems from the Greek...
Many patients cannot consciously remember the trauma(s) that they have suffered. This disconnection between events and memory can apply to an over-whelming trauma experienced in childhood that they could reconstruct only by hearing from their...
It is important always to keep in mind that medical abnormalities can present as anxiety disorders. This principle proves critical to establishing the correct diagnosis. Much as a patient with physical symptoms may feel his...
All of our symptoms occur within a human body. Inasmuch as the human body is genetic and comprised of DNA from each of our parents, there are dispositions towards the creation of anxiety that are...
Anxiety-related gender differences are complicated. In general, for reasons that seem entirely unknown to researchers at this time, women appear to be twice as likely as men either to inherit and/or experience an anxiety disorder,...
The 20th century was a watershed in neurobiology; in particular, the years 1990 to 2000 were the “decade of the brain.” To understand the neurobiology of anxiety comprehensively would require an intensive familiarity with neurochemistry...