Generalized Anxiety Disorder

At any given time, approximately 3 out of every 100 adults in the United States suffers from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (National Institute of Mental Health), with lifetime prevalence rates of approximately 6%. 

What is Generalized Anxiety Disorder?

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), is defined as frequent excessive anxiety and worry. In association with the worry, the individual may experience the following:

• Feeling restless or keyed up

• Being easily fatigued

• Difficulty concentrating or having your mind go blank

• Irritability

• Muscle Tension

• Sleep Disturbance 

GAD is essentially a fear of bad things happening in the future. Individuals with GAD worry about a large variety of fears such as a loved one dying or being in a serious accident, something horrible happening to their children, money/financial security, getting a serious illness or dying, how they are performing in their jobs, losing their job, being evaluated by others, making mistakes, etc. 

Individuals with GAD find it very difficult to control their worry and often describe worry as almost compulsive in nature. Long periods of time may go by before the individual realizes that they have been steeped in worry. 

Importantly, worry itself is conceptualized as a cognitive avoidance strategy. This may sound confusing, since worrying feels like the opposite. However, worry is thought to be a verbal/linguistic process versus an "imaginistic" process, the former of which distracts and inhibits appropriate appraisals of threat (Borkovec, Sahdick, & Hopkins, 1991).

 

In addition to worry, an individual may engage in other cognitive avoidance strategies such as planning and distraction. Individuals with GAD also frequently engage in overt safety behaviors to reduce their feared consequences from happening (e.g., texting their loved one repeatedly to reassure themselves that their loved one is safe, googling information about feared illnesses or conditions, procrastination, over-preparation, etc.). Unfortunately, all of these avoidance strategies only serve to perpetuate worry and fear and the individual ends up inadvertently maintaining their symptoms. Lastly, individuals with GAD report that, if the thing they were worried about recently has been resolved, they will start scanning for threat to make sure everything is safe, and will inevitably find something else to worry about.