Anxiety Disorders Flashcards
Fear
- An immediate alarm reaction to danger
- Strong nervous system arousal
- Fight or flight response
Anxiety
- Negative mood state
- Bodily symptoms of physical tension
- Apprehension about the future
- Not an immediate alarm state, but similar effects
Panic
- Abrupt experience of intense fear or discomfort
- Heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness
- What is perceived as danger is usually coming from the symptoms
- Physical symptoms can make them afraid
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
- Uncontrollable, unproductive worry
- Anxiety and worry must be ongoing more days than not for a period of at least 6 months
- Must be difficult to turn off or control the worry process
- Muscle tension, mental agitation, susceptibility to fatigue, irritability, difficulty sleeping
Avoidance Theory
- Restrict Autonomic Arousal
- Visualizing your fears as opposed to thinking about them, a means of protecting oneself from emotional stress with confronting painful personal fears or problems by excessive reasoning - Prepare for future threat
- Avoid thinking about more emotional material
- If I think about what my kids are doing at school, I won’t have to think about how my marriage is falling apart
Behavioral Reinforcement
- Almost superstitious
- A person will worry all week, and nothing bad will happen, which will reinforce their worrying
Intolerance of Uncertainty
If I think about every possible outcome, things won’t be uncertain. If I’m still anxious, I obviously haven’t thought about every possible outcome. Once I think about all of the dangers, I’ll be calm.
Metacognitions
Worrying about worrying
Social Anxiety Disorder
- A kind of phobia
- Repeated anxiety about social situations where one could be exposed to possible scrutiny by others
- Fear of being negatively evaluated
Systematic Desensitization
- Most well established for anxiety disorder
- Uses relaxation training and exposure
- Subjective units of distress: using a scale of 1/10
- Once the patient can regulate their emotions enough, they can be exposed to their fear BUT ONLY IF THEY CAN RELAX
- Not relaxing during the exposure can actually make things way worse
- E.g. A nurse making a patient with agoraphobia go outside for a walk every day. Patient is terrified during the walk but then feels better once they’re inside back in their room - this reinforces that going back into her room makes everything better. There needs to be a positive experience at some point during exposure to make this work.
Panic Disorder
- Apprehension leading to intense fear
- Sensation of “going crazy”
- Racing heartbeat, rapid breathing, dizziness, nausea, sensation of heart attack or imminent death
Agoraphobia
- Fear and avoidance of situations, people, or places where it would be unsafe to have a panic attack
- In the extreme, inability to leave the house or even a specific room
- Often develops after experiencing a panic attack
Thought Action Fusion
Person with OCD believes that having a thought is as bad as doing something
Magical Thinking
My thoughts can cause things to happen
Setting Event
In PTSD, exposure to a traumatic event during which an individual experiences or witnesses death or threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violation
- Learning that these things happened to someone else can also trigger
