"I'm not afraid of anything in particular, but in fact I'm afraid of everything," says the person who experiences unfounded fear. It's uncertainty lurking in the shadows, setting a trap that takes your breath away and the will to leave the house. As if you were sitting in solitary confinement, in a room without windows. As if you were in a spiral of worry, in a suffocating ball of despair. Unfounded anxiety is as if there were an incisive moment in your existence when you had to wake up and open your eyes to all the responsibilities and weight of life, when you had to surrender to all the incessant movement and noise of human relationships. It feels like all the movement not only overwhelms you, but also makes you smaller. In her diaries, Virginia Woolf wrote that life is like a dream and that waking up kills you.
"Fear is always ready to make things worse than they really are."
Of course, everyone wakes up at some point and discovers scary and difficult facts. But thousands of men and women experience something much more painful than that. They feel a diffuse, formless fear that takes over everything in a behavioral pattern of excessive and recurring worry. This emotional state of growing uncertainty and chronic stress leads to chronic unfounded anxiety, which is part of the generalized anxiety disorder. This reality is as exhaustive as it is complex, because unlike other disorders, the concerns and reactions of those affected are not directed at anything in particular, but are much more all-encompassing. The patients' feeling can be summarized in a simple, but therefore not less powerful sentence: "I always think that something bad will happen to me."
Unfounded worry and irrational fear
Adrian is 35 years old. After a ten-year relationship, his wife left him. She had fallen in love with someone else, and while our protagonist seemed to come to terms with this, those around her began to notice disturbing things. Although Adrian has always been somewhat anxious, after the breakup he began to constantly deal with problems that had not played a major role in his life until then, z. B. with the health of his parents and his own financial security. He began to worry that his parents would get sick and die, that he would lose his job.
His colleagues also noticed this. Adrian is an architect and for some time he has been obsessed with not making mistakes. He worries excessively about whether or not he is doing his job well, and whether or not some misfortune might happen on his watch. He is also afraid of not being able to pay his mortgage and is already thinking about what expenses he could cut if he loses his employment.
But nothing has happened yet.
It is estimated that generalized anxiety disorder and associated unfounded anxiety, which affects almost every aspect of life, affects women more often than men. However, the majority of those who are affected and do not get treatment because they do not seek help are male.
Why does everything worry me?
To understand generalized anxiety disorder and its associated unfounded fear a little better, we must first examine the purpose of fear: to prepare to respond to a threat. Anxiety is an extraordinary adaptive mechanism trained over thousands of years that has allowed us to survive until now. Of course, only as long as the anxiety we feel is caused by a real threat. What if fear and worry begin to take over every aspect of our lives? What if we are stranded in a parallel universe similar to our worst nightmare? Because there is nothing worse than living in fear.
Many scientists and neuropsychiatrists agree that generalized anxiety disorder is different from all other anxiety disorders. Experts explain that unfounded anxiety is caused by central nervous dysfunction that also affects the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-like structure that mediates between perception, memory and emotion. At some point, the circuits that make up this region become altered for reasons that are not yet known, and order and balance are lost in the person's life.