Childhood should be filled with carefree days running around outside, playing dress-up, and goofing off with friends.  There are usually few, if any, real responsibilities, so most kids limit their worrying to ensuring that nothing important is left off of their holiday-time wish lists.

Unfortunately, for children with generalized anxiety disorder, their days are spent differently, as they battle overwhelming fears and stressors about school, their appearance, the future, friends, and anything else that might cross their mind. They're often up restless at night with worry and self-doubt taking over their thoughts, and during the day, they find it hard to concentrate.

While some anxiety at a young age is normal, it's important to learn the symptoms of GAD in kids to know when a child's level of stress is becoming unhealthy.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found patients suffering from generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, have abnormalities in the way their brain unconsciously controls emotions.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 18 percent of Americans have an anxiety disorder. GAD in particular is marked by extreme feelings of fear and uncertainty; people with the disorder live in a state of non-stop worry and often struggle getting through their daily lives.

"Patient's experience anxiety and worry and respond excessively to emotionally negative stimuli, but it's never been clear really why," said Amit Etkin, MD, PhD, acting assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine and first author of the study.

Etkin recruited 17 people with GAD and 24 healthy participants and used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a behavioral marker to compare what happened when the two groups performed an emotion-based task. The task involved viewing images of happy or fearful faces, overlaid with the words "fear" or "happy," and using a button box to identify the expression of each face. Not all the words matched up -- some happy faces featured the word "fear," and vice versa -- which created an emotional conflict for participants.

With a lot of anxiety occurring around the job market and the economy, employees are apparently showing better work habits. This is a part of anxiety that many people do not think about: it can be motivational. For more on this, read the Top 5 Ways Anxiety Can Be Helpful.

To keep track of the articles on this site and those yet to come on anxiety and substance use, I created a new page "Substance Use & Anxiety". If there are any particular areas you think would be good to cover in more depth related to that, make sure to leave a comment.