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Anxiety Community
This patient support community is for discussions relating to generalized anxiety, anxiety and eating, anxiety and sleeping, mood swings, and phobias.
can Anxiety cause serious chronic health problems ?!
by gaaz, Dec 27, 2006 12:00AM
please i need help ..
i dont have to tell the long story starting from fearing of having brain tumor ..diabetes ..etc etc ..
any way i finally have been diagnosed with anxiety
now my complaints is iam afraid of anxiety ..
can anxiety cause me hypertension (sustained hypertension as a disease) ?!!
can it cause my glucoma .. or corneal ulcer .. (as iam haaving a dilated pupil all the time with slightly sore eyes ?!!!
can it cause any serious chronic disease ?!!
by the way .. i just decided not to take any medications as iam goin on a cognitive therapy ..
but i just wanna make sure that no chronic disease or serious prob can anxiety percipitate during the long therapy iam havin
please i need answers
i dont have to tell the long story starting from fearing of having brain tumor ..diabetes ..etc etc ..
any way i finally have been diagnosed with anxiety
now my complaints is iam afraid of anxiety ..
can anxiety cause me hypertension (sustained hypertension as a disease) ?!!
can it cause my glucoma .. or corneal ulcer .. (as iam haaving a dilated pupil all the time with slightly sore eyes ?!!!
can it cause any serious chronic disease ?!!
by the way .. i just decided not to take any medications as iam goin on a cognitive therapy ..
but i just wanna make sure that no chronic disease or serious prob can anxiety percipitate during the long therapy iam havin
please i need answers
Post Comment
First you have anxiety or fear.
Then you develop the fear of the fear. The mind tends to treat anxiety like an autoimmune disorder so it attacks the fear with more fear.
You begin to fear the fear or feeling the original fear and so on....
It is as though you're mind begins to build a vast fortress to protect itself from the fear, and it keeps building wall after wall, barbed wire fences, and this can go on for a lifetime until you realize at some point that you haven't really built a fortress, you're not in a safe place at all; instead you have built a prison and you are trapped in the prison with your anxiety. That is an intolerable sitaution and that is WHY I ALWAYS come back to the point that you MUST treat anxiety as soon as possible. The minute it shows it's face you must find a way to deal with effectively because if left unchecked over the years, it will take a greater toll on your mental health, leaving you with very little life to live.
To answer you're question: Anxiety can be considered a factor in any number of diseases, like diet and exercise; anxiety is a mitagating factor but not a root cause.
Anxiety, panic, constant worry can make your blood pressure temporarily rise but not on a sustained basis. Anxiety will not cause malignant hypertension. Hypertension is another condition altogether and anxiety would not make it better but anxiety alone can not cause you to have sustained and permanent high pressure. It just will not happen unless you have other underlying medical issues. So, if you're worrying about anxiety causing hypertension, just don't. Anxiety will cause the occassional rise in blood pressure that you would get from jogging or playing a game of tennis. Your blood pressure goes up and down all day,l that is what normal blood pressure does. Now if your doctor tells you that you have high blood pressure, there a medications to manage that and they are very effective.
Anxiety is not going to make any medical condition better but it cannot create a medical condition such as an ulcer or arthritis. That is not to say that anxiety won't manifest itself physically - we all know that it does that very efficiently!
Gastric problems, headaches, muscle twitching, heart palpitations and all these things can be terrifying and it is hard to hear that they really don't mean anything because they seem so real. They all dissapate when you get the proper treatment for the underlying cause which is... anxiety.
And you won't go insane either; anxiety can make you feel like your losing your mind but psychosis doesn't have it's root in anxiety, it just doesn't happen that way. People who have schizophrenia and psychotic conditions have very distinct and different mental disorders and are totally unrelated to anxiety.
A patient of mine once described anxiety as a ghost which could assume the form of the thing that will terrify you the most. It seems large and dominant when in reality it is large shadow. Sometimes it helps to make that your focus, to realize that anxiety is army of shadows which seems terrifying but if you try to find anxiety, to grab hold of it, try to look it in the face, you cannot because it is all shadow, it's all show and no substance. That is not to say that if you see anxiety for what it is, then everything will get better, we know that is not true. But if you really look at what it is and where it comes from, the shadow gets a little smaller and that is a start.