Feeling anxiety is a normal emotional response. Whether it is just before an exam, due to a conflict at work, or just before making an important decision, anxious symptoms can occur. In fact , in uncertain or stressful situations it is normal to experience this phenomenon .

However, when anxiety affects a person in a way that causes him or her to function abnormally in one of the areas of his or her life (relationships with others, school, work, etc.), then we’re talking about an anxiety disorder.

In this article we will see what are the different types of anxiety disorders , their characteristics and symptoms.

Characteristics of anxiety disorder

Individuals may experience anxiety differently, and while some suffer acute panic attacks from their catastrophic thoughts, others experience the anxious symptoms in social situations.

There are also people who have excessive, irrational and persistent worry and anxiety. Anxiety disorders cause much suffering to the person who suffers them , and it is one of the most frequent reasons for consultation in psychological therapy.

Anxiety is a condition that causes both physical and psychological symptoms, and affects millions of people worldwide.

On the other hand, the symptomatology of this pathology is classified in three groups:

  • Behavioral : Producing changes in the way we act.
  • Cognitive : the way we think or how we perceive our environment is also affected by anxiety.
  • Physiological : Causes a series of physiological responses, such as palpitation, dry mouth, etc.

Types of Anxiety and Their Characteristics

Because people experience anxiety disorders in different ways, psychologists and psychiatrists have created categories for each of the different types of anxiety. They are as follows.

  • Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Panic disorder
  • Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
  • Social Phobia
  • Agoraphobia
  • Specific phobia

In the following lines we will go into detail about each of these disorders and explain their characteristics:

1. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD is a fairly common anxiety disorder . It is characterized by the person who has it displaying behaviors that may seem strange, something that happens in a wide variety of situations and without any clear trigger for the discomfort they experience. In other words, it is associated with diffuse anxiety, which tends to be sustained over time regardless of what is happening around the person.

In some cases, anxious thoughts can be beneficial to us, as they keep us alert. For example, there is nothing wrong with checking that the door to our house is locked before we go to bed, so we can make sure that no one steals from us. The problem arises when, after checking the doors and windows, we repeat the same behavior over and over again, because we think that if we don’t, something bad will happen to us.

This disorder is characterized by obsessive and compulsive behaviors. Obsessions refer to intrusive thoughts, ideas, or images, which cause worry and anxiety and which appear over and over in the mind. Compulsions are actions taken to reduce the anxiety caused by the obsessions.

For example, an obsession may be the thought: “if we don’t turn the room switch on and off ten times in a row we’re going to die”. Compulsion, on the other hand, is the act of turning the lights on and off. Not performing the compulsions causes great discomfort and a strong feeling of anxiety.

It should be noted that although OCD has often been classified as an anxiety disorder, by other criteria it’s more associated with impulse control disorders. In fact, it has been found that those with this psychological disorder tend to have higher scores on impulsivity, indicating that their problem is not so much a tendency to seek perfectionism, but rather a failure to avoid performing the compulsions.

2. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

PTSD occurs when an individual suffers a traumatic situation that has caused a strong emotional impact and stress . People with PTSD continually relive the event that triggered the disorder, for example, being the victim of a rape or having participated in a war.

If the emotional impact is too great, people’s discomfort can last for years, and some people need psychological support because they are unable to cope on their own.

In part, this type of anxiety disorder is based on emotional memory : memories relating to an experience are “stored” in the brain in a dysfunctional way, so that these images appear unexpectedly in the person’s consciousness relatively often, causing him or her great discomfort.

Symptoms include:

  • Reliving the trauma : they can constantly relive the trauma, for example with nightmares.
  • Responding to stressors : the person can relive the event in the presence of stressors similar to the situation or scene of the event. For example, by hearing loud noises or recognizing a similar smell.
  • Recurrent anxiety : the individual experiences anxiety on a regular basis.
  • Emotional problems : the person also experiences emotional problems, e.g. disinterest in relationships with others.

3. Panic disorder

Panic disorder is characterized by feelings of impending death and shortness of breath . These are sensations that the person perceives as very real despite being aware that they are not the product of reason, which causes him/her intense fear and, consequently, great discomfort. In serious cases, the patient may even have to be hospitalized.

Symptoms are highly debilitating and include

  • Unexpected and repeated panic attacks.
  • Once the first panic attack has occurred, the person thinks that another one will occur, at least for a month.
  • Concern about panic attack symptoms. For example, thinking that it is an undiagnosed medical illness or that they are going to have a heart attack.
  • Changes in your usual behavior, such as avoiding sports because of the symptoms you are experiencing
  • Attacks usually last half an hour, with a peak at about 10 minutes.
  • Its frequency can vary from several times a day to once every few years.

4. Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Many people experience anxiety at certain times: when they’re about to play a big basketball game, before an exam, or when they’re meeting a girl they love for the first time. However, individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) feel worried or anxious most of the time , for several months, and not just in situations that may cause stress.

In GAD, concerns are persistent (occurring on half of the days for at least six months), intense, irrational, and interfere with the normal functioning of some area of the affected person’s life. For example, work, friends, or family.

In this way, the anguish linked to Generalized Anxiety Disorder is based on a feeling of diffuse discomfort, which does not arise in a specific context or with a specific stimulus. Psychological therapy is essential to combat this psychological disorder, and as the way in which it is expressed is very variable and changes depending on the characteristics of each patient, having the personalised attention of a professional who follows up the case is very important; it is of little use to try to apply what has worked for others (something that happens in all psychological disorders in general, but which is especially true in this one).

5. Social phobia

It is common to think that shyness and social phobia are the same thing, but in reality they are not . Social phobia is a serious disorder, and people who suffer from it feel so bad in social situations that they are unable to control their fear and anxiety, so they often avoid these types of situations.

Feeling shy about speaking in public is normal, but when that fear and anxiety disrupts an individual’s normal life functioning, it becomes a severe problem. People with social phobia can avoid all kinds of social situations, for example, going to a restaurant to eat, because they live with a great fear of being judged or observed.

Thus, this is one of the types of anxiety disorders that most affect personal relationships, something that not only generates a feeling of isolation and unwanted loneliness, but also has implications for the person’s material living conditions : having less access to others means having less support and help.

6. Agoraphobia

Agoraphobia is the irrational fear of not being able to count on the help of others in a moment of emergency . This is why it often occurs when the person is in public spaces and open places, such as parks or streets. But it is not the public spaces that are the root of the problem, but the possibility of suffering a panic attack and being unprotected in these places.

In other words, in this anxiety disorder the anticipation of the crises plays a very important role, and exerts an effect of “self-fulfilling prophecy” . This influence of catastrophic predictions about what can happen occurs in all anxiety disorders, but in this one it plays a leading role.

People with agoraphobia do not want to leave their homes and avoid traveling anywhere other than their home and office. Many times, people with agoraphobia also have panic attacks or PTSD.

7. Specific phobias

Phobias are irrational fears of a specific stimulus , for example, a situation, an object, a place or a living being of a certain species. Therefore, when a person suffers from this disorder he or she does everything possible to avoid that situation or object that causes anxiety and discomfort.

There are different types of phobias, for example, arachnophobia (spider phobia) or coulrophobia (fear of clowns). This is because these types of anxiety disorders take as many forms as different concepts create the human mind, and from these concepts phobias to certain natural or social phenomena are created. Some of them are really curious; you can discover them in the article: “The 15 most rare phobias that exist”.

Bibliographic references:

  • Abramowitz, J. S.; Jacoby, R. J. (2014). Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the DSM-5. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 21 (3): 221 – 235.
  • American Psychiatric Association (APA) (2014). DSM-5. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Madrid: Panamericana.
  • Balaban CD, Thayer JF (January-April 2001). Neurological bases for balance-anxiety links. J Anxiety Disord. 15 (1–2): 53 – 79.
  • Hofmann SG, Dibartolo PM (2010). Introduction: Toward an Understanding of Social Anxiety Disorder. Social Anxiety.
  • Kalueff, A.V., Ishikawa, K., Griffith, A.J. (2008). Anxiety and otovestibular disorders: linking behavioral phenotypes in men and mice. Behav Brain Res. 186 (1): 1 – 11.
  • McLaughlin, K.; Behar, E.; Borkovec, T. (2005). Family history of psychological problems in generalized anxiety disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychology 64 (7): 905 – 918.
  • Paul, J.W.; Elizabeth, A.. Phelps, eds. (2009). The Human Amygdala. New York: The Guilford Press.