The role of stress and anxiety for everyday life
Nowadays, stress and anxiety often go together and considerably influence upon the quality of our life. Considering the problem of stress and anxiety researchers attract attention to the fact that sometimes it is very difficult to separate these two entities and delimit them from each other.
The anxiety is a vague, unpleasant emotional condition characterized by expectation of an adverse succession of events, presence of bad presentiments, panic, tension and worry. The anxiety differs from fear by the fact that this condition is usually pointless while the fear assumes presence of an object, person, event or situation causing this fear.
Uneasiness is a propensity of the person to experience a condition of apprehension. More often uneasiness of the person is connected to the expectation of social consequences of his or her success or failure. The worry and uneasiness are closely connected to stress. On the one hand, emotions of disturbing lines are symptoms of stress; on the other hand, the initial level of uneasiness determines individual sensitivity to stress.
Scientists also define anxiety as a feeling of horror, terror, or dread and very often there is no obvious rational explanation for this condition. Anxiety differs from fear because the fear occurs as a reaction to an understandable and real threat. Anxiety, on the contrary, is a reaction to seemingly harmless circumstances or may occur as a result of internal psychological disagreement.
Sigmund Freud considered anxiety, also named angst, as the revelation of the internal conflict caused by the suppression from consciousness the frightening and alarming thoughts and feelings. Some scientists also think that angst or dread occurs as a result of menace to a person’s self-esteem. Behaviorists consider that dread is a reflected reaction to fear-provoking events. Psychologists found out that the simple assessment of the information as threatening or unsafe can generate and support the feeling of apprehension.
Researchers affirm that stress and anxiety cannot be defined unequivocally bad or good. Sometimes anxiety may be natural, adequate, and useful condition. Each person experiences the nervousness, apprehension or tension in certain situations, especially if he or she must perform something unusual or be prepared for it. Examples are making a statement before an audience or passing an examination. The person can experience anxiety walking in a dark street at night, or when he or she has lost the way in another city. This kind of fear is normal and even useful, because it helps to prepare for a performance or statement, to study a material before examination, to reflect upon whether it is really necessary to go out alone in the street at night. Thus, some stress and anxiety inevitably arise in the course of daily life and are considered normal.
In other cases, however, the anxiety is abnormal, unsound, absurd, and destructive. It turns out to be chronic, steady and develops not only in stressful circumstances, but also without any understandable reasons. Constant, strong, interminable, or persistent angst that cannot be explained by reaction to real stresses is now considered as a sign of an emotional disorder. Such an anxiety unreasonably induced by a specific condition or thing is called phobia by the doctors. Doctors also describe a free-floating anxiety when it takes a diffuse and persistent character and is not associated with any particular cause. This apprehension may even interfere with patient’s daily activity.
Is it necessary to treat pathological anxiety? According to the rules of modern psychiatry, it is for the person to decide. If he or she has decided to suffer from this unpleasant emotional condition and bear it within, he or she is considered to be practically healthy and not requiring the psychotherapeutic help. If the person wants to increase the quality of life and get rid of pathological fears, he or she asks for the professional help.
