Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a mental health condition that affects almost 6% of adults at some point in their lives.1 Still, many people suffer for years without recognizing that their chronic worrying is a treatable mental health condition.
GAD’s concerns are often disproportionate and feel uncontrollable. Your worries can shift from topic to topic, finding new threats the moment an old one resolves, as well as creating physical symptoms that compound your distress.
Knowing when your concerns cross over the line can help you recognize when you need professional help instead of just better coping strategies. To help you better understand the generalized anxiety disorders adults can experience, this page explores:
GAD typically involves free-floating anxiety that tends to attach to whatever is available: work, health, finances, relationships, world events, or even minor daily tasks. The feelings and impacts of such anxiety seem to have no “off” switch.
The symptoms of GAD are typically strikingly different from normal, everyday concerns. You don’t just think about problems and their potential solutions – you ruminate endlessly without resolution, imagining all the worst-case scenarios. The process of worrying itself quickly becomes the problem, consuming hours daily and preventing your engagement with actual life.1
A diagnosis also requires at least three of the following six symptoms for adults:1
Feeling restless: Being unable to relax or experiencing a constant sense of nervous energy that prevents you from settling into a calmer state.
For example, gastrointestinal distress is a common symptom. Nausea, diarrhea, and stomach discomfort can all result from the gut–brain connection and how it can be affected by chronic stress hormones. For this reason, people with GAD are also sometimes diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome.2
Cardiovascular symptoms include racing heart, palpitations, chest tightness, and elevated blood pressure from sustained sympathetic nervous system activation. These symptoms can also trigger health anxiety, feeding into physical symptoms causing anxiety about general anxiety and vice versa.3
Headaches, particularly tension-type headaches, are also common. Migraines might also increase in frequency when your baseline anxiety levels stay elevated.
Trembling, sweating, feeling lightheaded, and shortness of breath can also occur within the context of anxiety. Dry mouth, difficulty swallowing, and feeling as if there’s a lump in your throat result from muscle tensions affecting your throat and esophagus.4
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Everyone worries. Anxiety serves an adaptive function, alerting you to genuine threats and helping motivate you to prepare for challenges.
Normal worry can connect to a specific, identifiable stressor and usually resolves on its own when circumstances change. For instance, you worry about a job interview, but stop worrying when it’s over. In cases like this, the worry is proportionate to the actual stakes and doesn’t dominate your life outside of the genuinely stressful period.
GAD worries, on the other hand, are typically constant and feel out of control. You might feel relieved for a bit after good news, before your mind finds something new to catastrophize. These concerns also exist independent of your stressors – even during calm periods, you find things to worry about because your anxieties need something to attach to.
Additionally, normal worries often lead to problem-solving. You identify your concerns, consider solutions, take action, and are able to move forward. GAD-based worries lead to rumination without resolution, cycling through the same fears without reaching any conclusions.
Think about whether your anxiety improves your life or impairs it. Normal concerns motivate preparation and problem-solving that leads to better outcomes – GAD worry creates suffering without the corresponding benefits.
Do you worry most days about several different things? Do others tell you you worry too much? Do you struggle to stop worrying once you start? If the answer to any of these is “yes,” you might benefit from professional evaluation and treatment.
Mental health support for adults with GAD patterns can help you figure out whether your anxiety is interfering with your potential and abilities to find the treatments that work best.
To help reduce some of the challenges that come with finding a mental health treatment provider, A Mission for Michael offers a complimentary assessment for those who are experiencing mental health conditions. We focus on understanding your current symptoms and distress so that we can provide you with an accurate treatment recommendation.
This free and confidential assessment is included in our admission process. We believe that you should have all relevant information before choosing a treatment program. Contact us today to get started.
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The impairment of adult anxiety can affect every aspect of your daily life. Many people with generalized anxiety disorder don’t recognize the full scope of their issue because they’ve been forced to adapt to working around anxiety, rather than addressing it.
Some of the areas that GAD can impact include the following:
Needless to say, chronic anxiety makes work performance suffer. Concentration and decision-making can become paralyzed by anxiety, and career advancement can stall when your anxiety prevents you from putting yourself out there.
Workplace relationships can also suffer. You might appear distracted or distant to others, with the effects of hiding your constant anxiety preventing authentic connections with colleagues.
Trying to cope with chronic anxiety often means your loved ones bear the burden alongside you. Partners and family members become sources of reassurance you seek constantly, answering the same worried questions over and over (and creating an exhausting tension).
You can’t be fully present with a partner when part of your attention is busy running anxious scenarios over and over. As a result, sexual intimacy can also decrease due to distraction and fatigue.
Further, social connections can erode when socializing simply takes too much out of you. Canceling your plans when anxiety spikes and avoiding making commitments you might need to break can strain friendships as anxiety consumes the resources that could be used to maintain them.
To manage your anxiety, you might simply try to stop doing things that trigger it. Such avoidance feels protective, but it actually maintains and worsens the symptoms of GAD.
Avoidance means you’re not learning that feared outcomes don’t occur or that you can handle your anxiety without always needing to steer clear of your triggers. The temporary relief of avoidance reinforces anxious patterns, and over time the list of things to avoid grows while your life shrinks down.
The cumulative effect is a life much smaller and less satisfying than it could be. You’re surviving, not thriving.
A Mission For Michael (AMFM) provides treatment for adults experiencing various conditions. Anxiety support is a phone call away – call 866-478-4383 to learn about our current treatment options.
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GAD symptoms respond well to evidence-based interventions when you access the appropriate care. The best outcomes usually come from combined approaches with therapy targeting thought patterns and skills training to build your long-term anxiety management capacity. Medication management may also be considered when appropriate to address any acute episodes or co-occurring issues.
Anxiety disorder therapy utilizes several well-tested modalities designed to help. For instance, cognitive-behavioral therapy has a strong evidence base in anxiety treatment, helping you identify catastrophic thinking patterns and learn to challenge their perceived accuracy.
Individual therapy provides personalized attention to your specific patterns of worrying, while group therapy offers a shared experience for skill-building and connecting with others who are managing similar struggles.
Meanwhile, anxiety medication options can help to reduce your symptoms when combined with therapy. SSRIs and SNRIs are first-line medications that can help, with ongoing medication management for adjustments based on your responses and side effects.
Residential treatment for generalized anxiety disorder may be appropriate for people whose anxiety has created severe impairments or hasn’t responded well to outpatient care. You’ll engage in daily therapeutic activities alongside other holistic interventions in a wraparound, holistic environment.
Long-term anxiety management requires ongoing effort. With the appropriate treatment (not to mention strong aftercare options, including linkage to therapy and medication management), most people can achieve a significant reduction in their symptoms.
Chronic worrying may have stolen from you – but we can help.
A Mission For Michael offers residential, outpatient, telehealth, and aftercare programs across California, Virginia, and Washington for adults to start the recovery process. Our programs combine the best in evidence-based, holistic care with psychiatric services to help you manage your anxiety.
We also treat common co-occurring conditions like depression and trauma alongside GAD, accepting most major insurance plans.
Call us or contact us through our confidential online messaging service so we can help find the perfect treatment fit for your needs.
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If you’re concerned you have GAD, you may have some persisting concerns about the condition and its treatment options. For this reason, we’ve provided some responses to FAQs about generalized anxiety disorder.
No, generalized anxiety disorder is about a lot more than just being a worrier.
While some people naturally tend to be more cautious or concerned, GAD involves excessive worrying that goes on for at least six months (and often much longer).
It’s good to consider if your worrying consumes hours each day, shifts topics constantly, or resists assurance and logic. You should also think about whether it creates physical symptoms affecting your health. If so, then you likely have an anxiety disorder rather than an anxious personality – a treatable anxiety disorder.
GAD rarely resolves without intervention, and often worsens over time without treatment. It’s possible to experience periods of reduced symptoms when life feels calmer, but the anxiety usually returns and expands to new topics.
Thankfully, most people with GAD who receive treatment can experience major improvements – but waiting and hoping it resolves on its own can mean years of unnecessary suffering.
GAD and panic disorder are both anxiety conditions with different symptom patterns and treatment approaches.
Panic disorder involves sudden, intense feelings of fear (known as panic attacks) with physical symptoms like a racing heart, shortness of breath, chest pain, and feeling like you’re losing control.
In GAD, anxiety is always present, but rarely reaches panic-levels of intensity, while panic disorder is defined by major events with anxiety-free periods in between. Both conditions can co-occur and are treatable, though approaches may differ for each.
