Symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder
Wikipedia says that Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable and often irrational worry about everyday things, which is disproportionate to the actual source of worry.
My generalized anxiety disorder symptoms:
Back when I was suffering the symptoms, I hadn't yet heard about generalized anxiety disorder.
Over that time, I would catch myself obsessively worrying over things like my health, work, family and money. Yet, I knew that worrying about these things to the extent I did was irrational. I just couldn't stop myself from worrying about them. I had butterflies in my stomach more times than not.
Dumb things I would anxiously obsess over :
- My parents are getting old. They aren't going to live forever. Its really going to hurt me when they die.
- I never eat healthy enough. I am going to get super fat.
- I smoked cigarettes for too many years. Now its killing me. There's no way I can reverse that much damage.
- My brother is such a jerk. Why doesn't he change his ways? Why does he choose to be like that?
- My job is going nowhere. I should be much farther ahead in my career by now.
- I'm never going to make enough money to be able to live the way I want to. I see people my age driving nice cars all the time. Why can't I do it?
Other symptoms
It seemed like I was always tense, on edge, and irritable. I was always on the lookout for an anxiety attack. I could crack my neck a dozen times a day. My shoulders were tight. My hands were constantly shaky even to the point of embarrassment. I often had trouble falling asleep because I couldn't stop worrying over something trivial. I would often panic over small things. I thought maybe I had attention deficit disorder because I was such a scatterbrain. I was unable to focus my thoughts or attention on any one thing for any real length of time.
It seems that some the symptoms I had could be associated with a number of various mental illnesses such as anxiety attacks, generalized anxiety disorder or even depression. At the peak point in my illness, my condition had progressed to being a very serious depression.