Generalized Anxiety Blog

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.

For a little bit of a fun change of pace, research is showing that most people believe that their dreams have significance and can lead to insights into their lives. As a therapist, I end up talking about dreams with my clients at times, and have seen really important personal change come from this process. So whether you believe in the unconscious speaking to your through dreams or whether you think they are random neurons firing, give interpretation a try sometime, even if it's just for fun.

There continues to be research showing physiological changes due to abuse, the most recent showing changes in a gene that may be related to our ability to deal with stress. I think this type of research will eventually have a major impact on the understanding of anxiety disorders like GAD, and possibly even guide treatments.

Researchers in sports psychology have known about this for awhile, but in a clutch situation, over-thinking can disrupt performance. This is demonstrated very well by a great video report from the BBC. Anytime we get anxious we start to micro-analyze our performance, and this will negative impact performance due to increased and unpracticed communication between brain structures. The lesson is to try and be as natural as possible in performance situations and let the activity flow rather than over-think.

Psychologists and researches continue to be fascinated with eastern philosophy and life practice. Mindfulness is appropriately all the rage, and here is a great article detailing some other things related to anxiety and living in the now. Wonderful.

Apparently there is an increasing number of physicians that are recommending massage, acupuncture, and others for a wide variety of conditions. People with GAD often report some relief from anxiety and stress with alternative treatments, so this is quite interesting that it is catching on in more mainstream medicine for other conditions as well.

Some interesting research has made a link between balance (as in musculo-skeletal ability) and anxiety for children. Moreover, there appears to be some reduction in anxiety levels after a brief intervention to teach better balance. I'm not sure there is a direct link here or that there is another factor involved like physical exercise, but it is interesting. For more on anxiety treatments check out the Anxiety Treatment Guide.