3 types of anxiety and 6 types of disorders

Anxiety as experienced by many people can be defined as multifaceted mixture of feelings of fear, worry very often followed by physical sensations like palpitations nausea, chest pain, and asphyxia. According to doctors anxiety is differentiated in to three types viz. cognitive, somatic and emotional with many behavioral mechanisms.

Somatic

Where there is somatic anxiety the body readies the organism to cope with a threat like emergency reaction with increased blood pressure and heart beat, sweating and additional blood flow to the key muscle groups. Externally somatic signs include paleness of skin, sweating, trembling and dilation of pupils of the eye.

Emotional or behavioral

A sense of foreboding or panic characterizes emotional anxiety where the patient is physically afflicted with nausea and cold chills. Behavioral anxiety, voluntary or un-voluntary, instigates the patient to run away from the source or avoid it. Such behaviors recur time and again are maladaptive and are the extreme types of disorders. This is not to say that anxiety is always maladaptive or pathological. In other words the usual emotion coexists with fear, anger, sadness and happiness and has a vital role in the survival of the patient.

Anxiety in medical parlance is the result of neural circuitry involving amygdale and hippocampus. When the patient faces stimuli which are unpleasantly and harmful like foul smells, odors and tastes there is an increased blood flow in the amygdale resulting in a moderate increase of anxiety. This shows that it is a protective mechanism to prevent the patient from resorting to detrimental behavior like eating rotten food.

Recurring cases of anxiety disorder seriously affect the life of a patient. But these can be clinically diagnosed. The most common of these disorders are (1) Panic disorder (2) generalized anxiety disorders (3) social anxiety disorders (4) phobias (5) obsessive compulsive disorders and (6) post traumatic stress disorders.