According to the World Heath Organization (WHO), 33% of the world´s population suffers from the century´s greatest evil: anxiety. Feeling anxious is as common as feeling angry, happy, guilty or any other emotion that humans experience on a daily basis. However, when that feeling ends up harming someone by inhibiting his or her personal routine, it´s time to look for some help.
The causes of the disease are multiple. It can manifest itself based on external conditions, as a trauma or the environment in which the person is inserted. That´s why anxiety is denominated the disease of the 21st Century. Considering that we live in a moment of crisis and enormous personal expectations, stimulated by the digital era, the number of anxious people just gets higher. Also, the disease can be impulsionated by physical causes, like genetic circumstances (historic of mental illness), chronic diseases and the use of chemical substances.
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In interview with the psychologist Thais Silva, she affirmed that being anxious is being constantly afraid of something unknown and inexplicable. Other symptoms are the excessive exudation, accelerated heartbeat, breathing difficulties, stomachaches, bad digestion, intestinal nuisance and alterations in the nervous system. It can also cause physical reactions, such as allergies, dermatitis and hives. During stronger crisis, the individual can think that he or she is having a heart attack and experience a nearly death sensation.
As tough as the symptoms may be, there are techniques to deal with anxiety and to isolate crisis. Here are some tips that the psychologist suggests to her patients:
- Practice physical exercises regularly;
- Eat healthy;
- Sleep well;
- Be less exposed to stressing factors;
- Talk to a psychologist;
- If necessary, take medicine prescribed by a psychiatrist.
If even with those techniques the patient ends up having a crisis, Thais affirms that the best alternative is doing breath control exercises, replacing bad thoughts with happy ones, meditating and any other activity that calms the anxious one.
The symptoms of mental disorders are normal to anyone living in the modern era, what changes is the intensity and frequency, that can actually diagnose these types of disease. Nowadays, a lot of healthy people claim to suffer from mental disorders, trivializing the diseases and difficulting the treatment of those who really need it. This is one of the reasons why Thais believes in the importance of psychoeducation: “teach the population to distinguish the levels between normality and disorders so we can promote suitable treatment for each case, without overmedicating on one hand or the lack of assistance, in the other”.