Anxiety

Anxiety is a common occurrence. Most people experience it in stressful situations, and it is normal. However, anxiety disorders differ from normal feelings of nervousness.

My question is: how do you know when you have an anxiety disorder and not just a feeling nervousness?

I'd like an answer to that question as well. I'm sure that a Google search could answer it. One thing I suspect is that if you have an ongoing source of anxiety in your life, like your job, it's going to spill over to other areas in your life. I teach children in a poverty area with a majority of immigrant families. Under the No Child Left Behind laws, we are categorized as a failing school. Our state has taken over the county school system and the workload for teachers has doubled. We are contantly observed, evaluated and trained on contantly changing curricula. We're anxious and exhausted. I find that my work-related anxiety is causing me to feel generalized anxiety everywhere I go. When you are repeatedly told that what you're doing isn't enough or isn't correct, you stop feeling hopeful, optimistic and happy. You become negative, irritable and tend to stay home far too much to avoid situations over which you have no control.

Allison, the anxiety you are feeling sounds like it is a perfectly normal response to the pressure you are under. In this case, the solution will probably have more to do with changing your life circumstances than taking a medication or other therapy.

A book that deals with this issue is The Culture of Our Discontent: Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness by Meredith Small.

MGL, to answer your question, anxiety seems to be a normal or evolutionarily useful response to things we really should worry about. In those cases, we might need to do something about our lives rather than look for a cure in medication. And when anxiety is temporary or mild, it probably is not at the "disorder" stage.

But it never hurts to talk to a therapist, I think, to clarify issues.

Lynne
Read my blog at Lynne's Anxiety Blog