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Although anxiety is a commonplace experience that
everyone has from time to time, it is difficult to describe
concretely because it has so many different potential causes and
degrees of intensity. Doctors sometimes categorize anxiety as an
emotion or an affect depending on whether it is being described by
the person having it (emotion) or by an outside observer (affect).
The word emotion is generally used for the biochemical
changes and feeling state that underlie a person's internal sense of
anxiety. Affect is used to describe the person's emotional
state from an observer's perspective. If a doctor says that a
patient has an anxious affect, he or she means that the patient
appears nervous or anxious, or responds to others in an anxious way
(for example, the individual is shaky, tremulous, etc.).
Although anxiety is related to fear, it is not
the same thing. Fear is a direct, focused response to a specific
event or object, and the person is consciously aware of it. Most
people will feel fear if someone points a loaded gun at them or if
they see a tornado forming on the horizon. They also will recognize
that they are afraid. Anxiety, on the other hand, is often unfocused,
vague, and hard to pin down to a specific cause. In this form it is
called free-floating anxiety. Sometimes anxiety being experienced in
the present may stem from an event or person that produced pain and
fear in the past, but the anxious individual is not consciously
aware of the original source of the feeling. It is anxiety's aspect
of remoteness that makes it hard for people to compare their
experiences of it. Whereas most people will be fearful in physically
dangerous situations, and can agree that fear is an appropriate
response in the presence of danger, anxiety is often triggered by
objects or events that are unique and specific to an individual. An
individual might be anxious because of a unique meaning or memory
being stimulated by present circumstances, not because of some
immediate danger. Another individual looking at the anxious person
from the outside may be truly puzzled as to the reason for the
person's anxiety. |
