Everyday, we sometimes will get anxieties from things beside us such as health, finance, relationships, social concerns and other things. In most cases, those anxieties will be relieved after a short period of time. However, if you always feel anxious during the day without any apparent reason about some minor things and issues which are very unlikely to occur, and it is very difficult to control those excessive worries and cannot concentrate on other things, that might be a sign of generalized anxiety disorder, which can be abbreviated as GAD. GAD is not a rare psychological disorder and it affects millions of people in the world. It is estimated that around 2% to 5% of the adults are affected, and more women are affected than men. Usually the criteria which can be diagnosed as GAD is that the symptoms will be lasting more than 6 months.
Different GAD patients may have different causes. Some common ones include genetic factors, biological factors, experience factors and lifestyle factors. Genetic factors mainly refer to the fact that the possibility of a person being easier to develop anxiety and mood disorders will be higher if some of his close family members already has GAD. Personality-wise, if a person has a timid or negative personality and tries to avoid any dangerous stuff in their daily life, they are more likely to get GAD. The biological factors are mainly focused on the amygdala which is the part of the brain responsible for the response to fears. Studies show that some patterns of elevated amygdala activities might be related with different anxiety disorders and GAD will be one of them. Those amygdala activities in the GAD patients' brain may wrongly interpret some normal social behavior threatening which they actually are not. Also, the increased amount of gray matter in the brain is also considered as a factor in relation to GAD and other anxiety and disorders. Experience factors refer to some special experience such as Trauma or maltreatment, especially the bad experience in their childhood. Those difficult experiences will increase a person's risk of developing GAD and other anxiety disorders. Moreover, learning behavior from childhood is another possible reason or GAD. Children will learn things from their parents including how to deal with challenging and stressful situations. If parents cannot deal with stress and fear properly, their children will tend to learn from them, which may contribute to the gradual development of anxiety in their adulthood.
The social factors indicate that the interactions between GAD patients and other people may exaggerate their symptoms because some of them cannot correctly distinguish the normal and abnormal social cues and interactions. The wrong interpretation of social behaviours might make them feel a high sense of danger or threats, which are actually not. For example, wrong interpretation of some non-verbal cues in communication such as facial expressions, body language may make GAD patients feel more angry and anxious. Some unhealthy lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol, and drug use may also increase the risk of GAD. Moreover, for a certain group of people such as women, relationships can be a significant source of anxiety for them. For people experiencing a heavy workload everyday, the workload related stress, particularly the fear of loss of a job, may help develop anxiety quickly.
In summary, not all GAD factors are controllable by us, but some of them are manageable and we should have strategies to cope with them well.
Attribution:
Image from Pixabay: [ Ссылка ]
