Everyone feels anxious now and then. It’s a normal emotion that typically passes. However, for people with anxiety disorders, such as Generalized Anxiety Disorder, anxiety does not just go away.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) is characterized by excessive, exaggerated anxiety and worry about ordinary, everyday life events with no obvious reason for worry. People with symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder tend to always expect disaster and can’t stop worrying. You feel excessive, unrealistic worry and tension with little or no reason. In order to be diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, you will likely have been suffering from these symptoms most days for an extended period of time, such as around 6 months.
Anxiety disorders can interfere with daily activities such as job performance, school work, and relationships and the distress they cause can keep you from carrying on with your life normally. Anxiety will also disrupt healthy functions like sleeping and eating. They might even develop other mental health problems, like agoraphobia, or display traits of OCB.
For people who have an anxiety disorder, worry and fear are constant and overwhelming, and can be debilitating. Often these people feel hopeless and unsure of how to change the way they feel. Sometimes, anxiety disorders can even cause anxiety or panic attacks. Some characteristics of an anxiety attack are an inability to breathe or a sense of choking, an overwhelming amount of fear, and physical responses such as sweating and shaking.
When you join an anxiety research study, you’re helping advance medical knowledge of treatment for anxiety. Through a clinical trial, you’re given an opportunity to meet with physicians in your area, and receive study-related treatment at no cost to you.