Anxiety is a mental health disorder that ranges from mild to severe and includes cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems. Anxiety can affect one's functioning in various life domains, including social, familial and occupational. There are several types of anxiety disorders, including the following:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) involves excessive worrying most of the time about various aspects of one's life (e.g., health, occupation, family, etc.).
Panic Disorder with or without Agoraphobia: Panic Disorder involves recurrent panic attacks. Panic attacks are brief periods of intense anxiety that involve physiological symptoms, such as shortness of breath, increased heart rate, sweating and dizziness, and may also include thoughts that one is going crazy or is going to die. Panic Disorder may become so severe that one does not leave his/her house and develops Agoraphobia, which is the fear of being in a place where it is hard or impossible to escape.
Specific Phobia: an intense fear of something specific, such as a place or thing. Specific Phobias are broken up into categories, including blood/injection phobia, heights or animals.
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): an anxiety disorder that develops after a person is exposed to a traumatic event in which he/she faces a near-death experience or observes someone else in a near death experience or in which the person's integrity is significantly compromised. PTSD includes symptoms of the traumatic event recurring, such as in flashbacks or nightmares, physiological and/or psychological reactivity upon exposure to cues that resemble the traumatic event, avoidance of cues of the event and increased arousal.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD): involves the presence of obsessions (e.g., intrusive thoughts) and/or compulsions (e.g., behaviors and/or thoughts).
Anxiety Disorder NOS exists when an individual does not meet diagnostic criteria for any specific anxiety disorder but has significant impairment due to anxiety.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety
CBT has been shown to effectively treat anxiety disorders. It is an empirically-based treatment for these disorders. CBT is an umbrella term that is used to describe a type of psychotherapy that focuses on changing the patient's thoughts and thereby changing his/her negative emotions and behaviors. There are different types of CBT that have been effective in treating anxiety, including Beck's Cognitive Therapy, Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Exposure Therapy with Response Prevention.
Exposure Therapy
Exposure therapy is a type of behavior therapy that involves exposing the patient to the anxiety-provoking stimulus and preventing the person from escaping. There are two types of exposure therapy: in vivo and imaginal. In vivo involves exposing the patient to the actual feared stimulus in real life. Imaginal exposure involves having the patient imagine the feared stimulus while the therapist narrates a scene.
Cognitive Therapy
Cognitive Behavior Therapy involves analyzing the patient's thoughts that are causing the anxiety and restructuring these thoughts, thereby decreasing the anxiety.
Systematic Desensitization
Involves pairing relaxation with the anxiety-provoking stimulus, which will decrease one's arousal. Based on the premise that a person cannot be aroused and relaxed at the same time.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Involves guiding the client through exercises aimed at relaxing body muscles one at a time. The patient is to tense a muscle and then relax that same muscle, paying particular attention to the differences between the physiological feelings between tension and relaxation.
Diaphragmatic Breathing
Breathing from one's abdomen instead of chest has been shown to decrease arousal and provide a calming response. The therapist walks the client through the breathing exercises.
For an updated, more in-depth look at this topic, see Anxiety & What You Need To Know.