Everyone experiences anxiety. It is characterized most commonly as a diffuse, unpleasant, vague sense of apprehension, often accompanied by autonomic symptoms such as headache, perspiration, palpitations, tightness in the chest, mild stomach discomfort, and restlessness, indicated by an inability to sit or stand still for long.
The particular constellation of symptoms present during anxiety tends to vary among persons (Kaplan and Sadock’s synopsis of Psychiatry, 2015).
Anxiety versus Fear
Anxiety is an alerting signal; it warns of impending danger and enables a person to take measures to deal with a threat. Fear is a similar alerting signal, but it should be differentiated
from anxiety. Fear is a response to a known, external, definite, or non-conflictual threat; anxiety is a response to a threat that is unknown, internal, vague, or conflictual.
Anxiety and fear both are alerting signals and act as a warning of an internal and external threat.
Anxiety can be conceptualized as a normal and adaptive response that has lifesaving qualities and warns of threats of bodily damage, pain, helplessness, possible punishment, or the frustration of social or bodily needs; of separation from loved ones; of a menace to one’s success or status; and ultimately of threats to unity or wholeness.
It prompts a person to take the necessary steps to prevent the threat or to lessen its consequences. This preparation is accompanied by increased somatic and autonomic activity controlled by the interaction of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (Kaplan and Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry, 2015).