I feel stressed, anxious

Anxiety can be an occasional reaction to real worries when we don't know how they're going to end. Once the adversity has passed, the anxiety subsides. This is known as reactionary anxiety. It's an inherent part of life!

Anxiety can be like an alarm system. It's there to help us detect potential dangers, to think about problems in advance so that we can deal with them, to help us solve problems as calmly as possible. Being over-anxious when you have to solve problems is not a good thing.

Anxiety can also be long-lasting, with a tendency to worry about real difficulties that we sometimes exaggerate, but also the absence of difficulties (which we then imagine). "Will this good weather last?", "Will my loved ones stay in good health? This "scope for anxiety" doesn't stop us from living, but it often disrupts our quality of life.

Anxiety can also be a real illness, distressing and troublesome. We worry about almost everything. And we speak about generalized anxiety where anxiety extends to all areas of life in an uncontrollable way. The tendency to worry excessively is accompanied by painful physical signs where tension in the body is added to worry in the mind.

Preconceived ideas about anxiety: sometimes we may think that worrying is useful, even necessary. These beliefs are not always 100% true, but people with anxiety tend not to question them and instead blindly believe them. Below are some preconceived ideas about anxiety:
• My anxiety helps me to cope better
• Worrying prepares me for the worst case scenario in case it occurs
• Not taking a victory lap too quickly keeps the evil eye away
• Being anxious means staying clear-headed
• Life is a jungle, anxiety is a matter of survival

After a trauma or prolonged exposure to stressful situations, our fear sensor and its trigger threshold go haywire. Fear is triggered in an excessive way, potentially resulting in panic attacks.

It's a sudden, intense anxiety attack, with many physical signs, leading to the belief that you're going to die or go mad. You don't understand what's happening to you and you may feel as if you're suffering from a physical illness. Even after undergoing medical exams that yield nothing, the physical symptoms remain very real.

Anxiety mice gnaw away at the cake of happiness...