What You Need To Know About Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Anxiety [AD]

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It’s normal for you to feel on edge, have upsetting memories, or have trouble sleeping after a traumatic event or trauma. You may find it hard to do the daily activities you are used to, like going to work, school, or spending time with people you care about. But most people begin to feel better after a few weeks or months. For some people, post-traumatic stress symptoms may start later or come and go over time. However, if it’s been longer than a few months and thoughts from the trauma are upsetting you or causing problems, you may have PTSD. 

People who experience traumatic events may have temporary trouble adjusting and coping. Still, with time and good self-care, they usually get better. However, if the symptoms worsen, last for months or years, and interfere with day-to-day activities, you may have PTSD. If you have post-traumatic stress disorder, visit medambien and find some relief. 

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the widely prevalent mental health condition triggered by a horrifying event, experiencing or witnessing it. Symptoms may be flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about the event. 

What Is PTSD?

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), once called shell shock or battle fatigue syndrome, is a severe condition that may develop after a person has experienced or witnessed a traumatic or terrifying event with serious physical harm or threat. PTSD is a lasting consequence of traumatic events that cause horror, intense fear, or helplessness. Examples of events that may bring on PTSD include:

• Sexual or physical assault
• The unexpected death of a loved one
• An accident
• A natural disaster
• War
• Other life-threatening events

Most people with a traumatic event will react with shock, anger, nervousness, fear, and guilt. These reactions are common and go away over time for most people. However, for a person with PTSD, these feelings continue and even increase, becoming so strong that they keep the person from going about his life as expected. As a result, people with PTSD have symptoms for longer than one month and may not function well before the event that triggered it happened. 

Anxiety and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Sometimes the feelings are mild, with slightly elevated heart rate or blood pressure, discomfort in social settings, or too many thoughts to go back to sleep quickly. Other times, anxiety experiences are debilitating: panic attacks that make the heart race and leave a person feeling like they are having a heart attack or physical symptoms resulting from obsessive worry about all the “what ifs” involved with an upcoming event. 

There are clear symptomatic similarities. Anxiety and PTSD affect sleep and energy. They both impact disposition and mood. They both trigger a need to be alert and exhaustingly on guard. Both conditions generate fear and worry surrounding non-imminent threats.

For the most part, typical anxiety is often generated without an actual precipitating situation.  Thoughts present in anxiety disorders do not necessarily relate to past events, and no real circumstance needs to drive the upset. The worry and fear are real, but the cause is often based on unsupported assumptions.

On the other hand, PTSD’s symptoms are driven by a significantly different force than other anxiety types. Suffering occurs because frightful circumstances are not imagined. Instead, something frightful happened, and in fact, a person with PTSD experiences the symptoms as if the event was happening again and again.

Anxiety Symptoms

• Fatigue and restlessness
• Hypervigilance
• Irritability
• Excessive, persistent worry
• Intrusive, fearful thoughts
• Difficulty with sleeping, digestion, and tension
• Reduced concentration
• Racing heart, sense of doom

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms

Although many of the anxiety symptoms are also associated with PTSD, Traumatic Stress Symptoms fall into four categories, and include:

• Re-experiencing symptoms. People with PTSD repeatedly relive the traumatic event through thoughts and memories of the trauma. These may include flashbacks, hallucinations, nightmares, dissociative flashbacks, intense distress related to triggers in some parts of the event, or bodily sensations associated explicitly with the traumatic event. 
• Avoidance symptoms. The person may avoid places, people, thoughts, or situations that remind him of the trauma. It may lead to feelings of detachment and isolation from friends and family and a loss of interest in activities he once enjoyed, such as avoiding any people, places, actions, words or objects related to the event and feeling detached, “spaced out,” or emotionally numb. 
• Negative thoughts and mood. It refers to thoughts and feelings related to blame, estrangement, and trauma memories, including difficulty remembering important parts of the event(s), ongoing negative moods and trouble having positive experiences.
• Arousal symptoms. These symptoms include excessive emotions, problems relating to others, feeling affection, irritability, difficulty falling or staying asleep, outbursts of anger, and difficulty concentrating. The person may also experience physical symptoms, like increased blood pressure and heart rate, muscle tension, rapid breathing, nausea, and diarrhoea such as irritability, angry outbursts, recklessness, self-destructive actions, watchfulness or edginess, feeling easily startled, poor concentration, sleep problems. 

While some anxiety symptoms and PTSD symptoms overlap, the difference is that with anxiety, the intrusive thoughts, persistent worry, and other difficulties are generally not tied to a specific or past event, whereas in PTSD, they are.

PTSD impairs your ability to recover from overwhelming events or to establish healthy thought patterns and relationships. It deserves to be set apart from common anxiety disorders for a good reason. To heal is possible, but the care of a well-trained therapist using safe, effective, research-based methods can be crucial.

PTSD Causes and Risk Factors

Everyone reacts to traumatic events differently. Each person uniquely manages fear, stress, and the threat a traumatic event or situation poses. For that reason, not everyone who has trauma will develop PTSD. Also, the help and support a person receives from friends, family members, and professionals following the trauma impact the development of PTSD or the severity of symptoms.

PTSD can develop after a traumatic event, for instance:

• natural disasters
• military service
• serious accidents
• terrorist attacks
• rape or other types of abuse
• personal assault
• being a victim of crime
• loss of a loved one, whether or not this involved violence
• receiving a life-threatening diagnosis

Conclusion

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) happens after you experience a traumatic event, causing you to feel fearful, shocked, or helpless. It may have long-term effects, including flashbacks, difficulty sleeping, and anxiety.