5 Kinds of Anxiety: What You Should Know

Though we all experience anxiety from time to time, when it becomes overwhelming and intrusive, an anxiety disorder may be present. There are 5 major types of anxiety disorders (like panic disorder and OCD), as well as specific manifestations of anxiety that aren’t separately categorized (like performance anxiety and separation anxiety).

It’s helpful to know that most anxiety disorders or experiences have both psychological and physical components, which is part of what can make them hard to recognize and manage. This is also true of why they happen—anxiety often has a genetic component but can also be the product of life experiences. Most people experiencing anxiety know that it is irrational, but that knowledge doesn’t go far in lessening the anxiety itself.

Treating anxiety is possible, but it takes time and involves different methods depending on the manifestation. In general, though, managing and reducing anxiety (or any other mental illness) is helped by evaluating your priorities and attending to your emotions. Here is some more information about different types of anxiety and what you can do to manage them.

Panic Disorder

Panic disorder is characterized by repeated panic attacks that start to affect overall behavior. Many people experience panic attacks without having this disorder—they can be one-off events or recur rarely. A pattern of panic attacks, however, can become a disorder when they are frequent, not tied to specific triggers, give rise to a lot of worry about having another attack, and result in changes in behavior, such as avoiding locations of past attacks. Panic attacks themselves are easily confused with heart attacks, as they can involve a racing heartbeat, a feeling of breathlessness, dizziness, chest pains, and sweating. They’re scary, but usually over quickly.

Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety is very common. It affects most people at some point in their lives, even those without an overarching anxiety disorder. It might present when you have to give a big presentation in front of your peers or take a high-stakes test. Like other forms of anxiety, it has physical symptoms, commonly dry mouth, nausea, and sweaty hands, as well as psychological ones. There are many techniques for combating test anxiety (preparation is key), and public speaking is an art that takes practice to master. Personal coaching, acting classes, and online seminars are all readily available and range in price.

Social Anxiety

Social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, is marked by an intense fear of social situations. People experiencing this disorder worry about embarrassing themselves, about being rejected, or about not even being able to carry on a conversation. People often try to hide their social anxiety, so you may not realize how common it is; it affects 15 million people in the U.S. Social anxiety can be generalized but often applies to particular situations, like talking with an authority figure, meeting new people, making phone calls, or going on a date.

PTSD

Not everyone who undergoes a trauma will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but some do. Disturbance in functioning after trauma can be normal, but if it continues for a few months it may be PTSD. Those with PTSD endure disruptive re-experiencing of events, are overly reactive, may avoid things that remind them of the experience, and will have cognitive or mood symptoms. There are a number of risk factors that make someone more likely to develop PTSD, but often quick treatment following the traumatic event can prevent its development.

Specific Phobias

Phobias are heightened fear responses to specific things—places, objects, creatures, or situations—that are not based on past experience. While fear responses play a role in all forms of anxiety, they especially shape this disorder. As with other forms, this type of anxiety comes with physical sensations and often diligent avoidance of the feared thing. Though people with phobias recognize their fears are irrational, they aren’t able to overcome them without some form of treatment.

Treatment

These different forms of anxiety can be treated by some variety of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT generally addresses both cognitive changes and behavioral changes, and it is the combination that helps people with anxiety change the fight-or-flight response that plays a role and stop avoiding potentially anxiety-producing situations. Another component of therapeutic treatment is psychoeducation around what happens with anxiety, which can help address the ever-present fear response.

Someone with a specific phobia, for instance, may undergo systematic desensitization, which will gradually expose them to the feared thing to reduce the fear response over time. For social anxiety, addressing the thought patterns that produce anxiety is helpful. Learning about the body’s fight-or-flight response can be helpful for people with panic attacks to understand what is happening with their bodies so they do not catastrophize the feelings, and learning relaxation techniques can help them manage panic when it does happen. PTSD is treated in therapy by helping the patient make sense of the event. Another treatment sometimes used for PTSD is EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing).

Sometimes medication is used to treat anxiety in conjunction with talk therapy. And for any form of anxiety, self-care routines such as attending to diet, sleep, exercise, and stress-reducing techniques can play a significant role in symptom improvement.