Anxiety - What Is Anxiety? | Thom O'Neill -

Anxiety - What Is Anxiety? | Thom O'Neill




Hi!
I'm Thom O'Neill
and this is my new vlog
Dr Thom.
A new channel dedicated to everything
teen health and sex education
and mental health and things like that.
I'm a doctor in Scotland
and I often see patients with mental health
problems
especially young patients.
So this week as part of
mental health awareness week in the UK
I'm making a series of videos all about
different mental health things that affect
everyone
but especially young people and teenagers.
In this video I want to take a little look
at anxiety.
Anxiety disorders are particularly common
in teenagers and young adults
but there's quite a lot of public ignorance
around them.
Which creates a stigma that prevents people
who need it from getting help.
So hopefully in this video I can explain
a little bit about anxiety and some of the
actual things that people with anxiety feel,
and what's happening in their bodies
that makes them feel those things.
So we all know people who are nervous
or just natural worriers.
Feeling stressed of anxious in appropriate
situations
is entirely normal.
These feelings are generated naturally
by our bodies in certain situations
to give us warning signs that we might be
in
risky or dangerous situations,
and that we might need to do something about
it.
Feelings of stress or anxiety
are actually a quirk of evolution.
They help prep the body in risky situations
in case you need to run,
or fight.
It's called a Fight or Flight response,
and it's a normal thing that happens in our
bodies.
But in people with anxiety disorders,
this system has malfunctioned.
If you've got an anxiety disorder,
these feelings and effects can happen
at inappropriate times,
or they can happen too much.
It can lead to being in a state of fear,
or worrying about stuff,
most or even all of the time.
So.
What are some of these feelings?
Well, people with an anxiety disorder
can feel on edge all of the time,
or can be hyper-aware of everything
that's happening around them.
They can have difficulty concentrating,
and they can have difficulty sleeping.
An awake brain is an active brain.
If you're not getting enough sleep,
it can make you very tired in the day.
This then affects people's concentration even
more.
On top of this,
a lot of people with anxiety disorders will
have
occasional feelings of panic or dread,
or even feelings of impending doom
in certain situations.
The common response is to want to escape these
situations.
This makes sense if you think about it.
Other than just being unpleasant feelings,
if you look at it from how our bodies have
evolved,
these feelings of anxiety are meant to
prep our bodies for getting out of risky situations.
So when people with anxiety disorders
have feelings of wanting to escape,
it's actually quite a reasonable reaction.
Our bodies have developed to turn these feelings
into physical signs.
In these situations,
people can feel their heart racing.
Their breathing getting heavy.
Their mouth getting dry.
They can feel their hands or even their whole
body shaking.
They can get hot flushes or blushing,
or sweating lots.
And can even start to feel dizzy of faint.
Anxiety can even start to make you ache,
or cramp up,
and give you feelings of knots in your stomach.
It can even make you sick.
These are all elevated responses
to what's meant to be a normal
Fight or Flight response.
These effects are all controlled by the nervous
system.
An imbalance between the different sides of
the nervous system.
It's the same system that does the funny things
I was talking about in my first video.
This inappropriate response of the nervous
system
leads to a big rush of a hormone called adrenaline.
It's the hormone that gives you a high
when you're on a rollercoaster,
but can also make you feel really awful
when it's released in response to these feelings.
Anxious thoughts make the nervous system release
adrenaline.
Adrenaline then causes those physical things
people feel.
The sweating, the heart rate,
the breathing, the feeling sick.
These physical things then make the anxiety
thoughts worse
and the whole vicious cycle starts again.
On top of this,
people can also hyperventilate.
This is when people breath so fast that
not enough oxygen is getting in with each
breath.
Normally we would breath in oxygen
and breath out carbon dioxide.
If you're not getting in enough oxygen,
you're not getting out enough carbon dioxide.
When carbon dioxide lingers in the body,
it can make us feel really lousy as well.
It can make your fingers and toes tingle,
it can give you a headache,
and can make you feel really odd.
Added to the physical effects of adrenaline,
this cycle can make you feel really rather
unwell.
So can you see that anxiety is a little bit
more
than people just worrying about things too
much?
We don't fully know what actually causes anxiety
disorders.
We know that they can develop in anyone
from around the age of eleven.
And that they're very common in
teenagers and young adults.
And there are a number of different
types of anxiety disorders as well.
A very common type is called
Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
This is a type of anxiety disorder that
affects people lives day to day,
and it makes people worry most, or all of
the time.
And it can affect everything,
from school and studying,
to travelling and work.
People with Generalised Anxiety Disorder
can often have some of the other anxieties
as well,
and it's also quite common for people to have
depression on top of the anxieties.
I've done a separate video about depression
that should be here.
Another type of anxiety disorder is agoraphobia.
This is a specific type of anxiety disorder
that gives people an intense fear of certain
situations.
This is very often to do with public places,
or crowded places,
or feeling very uncomfortable outside your
own home.
It often leaves people affected by it
stuck in their own homes,
and afraid to go outside.
This is often cause their anxiety symptoms
cause such strong physical symptoms
that they have panic attacks.
It's not hard to see why you'd want to avoid
those.
People with agoraphobia often find it
especially difficult to get help,
cause of having to go into other places
that they're unfamiliar with.
Similar to agoraphobia is
Social Anxiety Disorder.
If Generalised Anxiety Disorder
happens most, or all of the time,
Social Anxiety Disorder specifically happens
in social situations.
It's a specific fear or dread of social or
performance situations.
This could be meeting new people or strangers,
it could be speaking in public, or to a group.
It could even just be something like eating
or drinking in public.
Social Anxiety Disorder is often a hyper-awareness
of the physical symptoms of anxiety feelings
being displayed in public,
and a fear of the perception of this.
Whilst thoughts and fears can sometimes be
ignored,
it's particularly difficult to affect
the physical signs that people experience.
If you think of some of the feelings and physical
effects
that someone with Social Anxiety Disorder
might have
in an everyday situation in public,
try and then put them in an important hyper-social
situation,
such as dating for example.
You can see how debilitating an anxiety disorder
can be for people.
So here's the thing.
People with anxiety disorders know that
their thoughts and fears are irrational
most of the time.
The problem is that the mind makes it
very difficult to shift these thoughts,
and the physical symptoms are particularly
hard to get on top of.
So if you know someone with an anxiety disorder,
simply saying andquot;oh don't worry about itandquot;
andquot;don't worry so muchandquot;
isn't going to help.
What will be far more helpful
is to ask someone how they feel.
Let them talk to you about what they are feeling.
Let them sound off on you.
The stigma surrounding mental health issues,
particularly the ignorance around anxiety
disorders,
makes it particularly difficult for people
to speak up and get help when they need it.
It makes it even harder for people to seek
help
if they've got a fear of social situations,
social environments, public places,
or meeting new people.
So what can we do to help?
Well we need to talk about these things.
We need to reduce this stigma.
We need to make it as easy as possible
for people who need to access help
to be able to get it.
So that's all for this video.
I hope it's been useful
and I hope you've learnt something about anxiety.
I'm making a few videos this week about
different mental health issues
and about mental wellbeing as well.
If you subscribe below,
you'll be able to see them as they go live.
And I'll put some useful links and resources
in the description below.
I also want to give a quick shout out
and thank you to my friend Will
who very kindly made this wonderful
channel artwork for me.
It's very Saved By The Bell,
I really like it.
OK. That'll do for this video.
Until next time. Be good!
Yep, that is a Dalek doing the hoovering on
my t-shirt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GURyRa9wgQ