A Generalized Anxiety Disorder Is Characterized by What Symptoms?

After experiencing a number of unpleasant effects, many people find themselves typing these words into their internet search engine: “A Generalized Anxiety Disorder is characterized by what symptoms?”

Perhaps you can relate.

Feeling low on energy, restless, irritable? Are you experiencing lower back pain or whole body fatigue? Do you catch yourself playing scenes over and over in your mind to get the wording “just right”?

These are common symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The good news is, Generalized Anxiety Disorder can be treated through counseling and sometimes the addition of medication. You do not have to continue to be plagued by constant worry, overwhelm, and exhaustion from simply living life.

Many individuals who suffer with Generalized Anxiety Disorder come into my office hoping to more broadly increase their quality of life. Often, these individuals report a presenting problem like being in a professional rut or feeling confused and beaten down by an important relationship in their life.

What Does Generalized Anxiety Disorder Look Like?

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (as well as all other anxiety disorders) has kicked their brain into overdrive. After a day of constant thinking and worrying, it can feel too overwhelming to manage otherwise simple tasks like doing laundry, making that call to the electric company, or writing that email that you keep putting off. At first glance, these tasks seem easy enough, but that is part of the problem.

People who suffer with Generalized Anxiety Disorder are prone to critical self-evaluation and would likely look at the above list and think to themself, “Gosh what is my problem? It’s not hard! Why do I get tired so easily? I hate feeling chronically behind on such little things!”

While I understand why this part of them is talking, I also know that this type of internal dialogue perpetuates the cycle. After a mental lashing like that, the person will likely experience less self-efficacy, and behaviorally be less likely to get their “To-Do List” accomplished. Do not get me wrong, the lashing exercise may offer temporary effectiveness. It may have gotten someone through some past experiences, but life is a marathon and eventually shaming yourself into good behavior takes its toll, whether you associate to two or not.

Clients who often find me are busy, high-performing individuals who are motivated to lead flourishing lives, but feel stuck somewhere along the road. I have noticed a trend in my caseload, that clients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder seem to take the task of therapy very seriously, as they do in many areas of their life. They recognize the time, energy, and financial investment that successful counseling demands and want to see results, quickly.

My main therapeutic model, Integrative Problem-Centered Metaframeworks, allows me to address the immediate concern of delivering actionable steps, while also providing the long-term clinical depth to help clients explore the underlying stressors which may be contributing to their heightened anxiety. Specifically, I help clients restructure their cognitions and increase internal soothing.

Over time I have found that the individuals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder who enter my office seem to resonate most strongly with one or two of the symptoms. When they hear the full list of affiliated symptoms, they usually agree that the other items are present. For example, they may know that their irritability and shortness with loved ones is contextually a mismatch, but it seems to swell up before they are able to catch it and their family members are beginning to lose patience.

Other clients connect more with exhaustion, reporting that they get frequent headaches, experience muscle tension, and avoid or at the least highly premeditate completing non-essential social activities. When I ask a few more questions, the other symptoms are likely to pop up in more subtle ways. Being constantly aware of one’s surroundings, hyper-evaluative of one’s own behavior, worried about the safety of loved ones, and a general hectic lifestyle often leads clients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder to be extra susceptible to depression and interpersonal conflict.

A Generalized Anxiety Disorder Case Study

The definition of Generalized Anxiety Disorder is in its name: the regular presence of worry across multiple if not all domains of one’s life. To illustrate, allow me to introduce you to Pam (not an actual client) who came to me to discuss her recent feelings of overwhelm.

Pam tells me that she has a stable job, friends, a good family, and a comfortable townhouse in the city, but she still feels like something is off. She says that she knows that she leads a busy life, but she is also a go-getter and does not understand why “I cannot get my act together.” I ask Pam to describe some of the areas of her life that she feels dissatisfied. Pam relays that she feels anxious heading into work and thinks that her co-worker does not like her and has been trying to get close to another one of their co-workers, to forge an alliance against her.

Pam also worries about speaking up in team meetings. She tells me an anecdote about how earlier this week, she made a remark to her boss about his new hairstyle, and he must have misinterpreted it, because he seemed distant when she asked him a question about the project later in the day. Pam reported that she had thought about what she said to him and realized that there were at least three ways that she could have communicated more clearly to him about his haircut. Now he clearly is upset, and must think that she is rude.

When I ask Pam about her friendships, she initially says they are all great. But then with a moment of pause, she shares that usually she is good with her friends, but lately her friend Kim has not been texting her as much. Pam is beginning to think that Kim must have read what Pam had posted about the recent elections on Facebook, and must not have agreed and is freezing her out because of it.

Pam goes on to explain that she and her husband are “meh” and lately disconnected. I ask Pam what her routine after work usually looks like. Pam tells me about yesterday as an example: She was so burned out from the day that she skipped the gym, which seems to be happening a lot lately. She ran to the grocery store to pick up some food because she and her husband were not able to go grocery shopping on Sunday after church like they aimed to, because she overbooked their weekend schedule (like normal).

Pam tells me that once she got home she passed the groceries off to her husband and zoned out on her phone until the food was ready. While they were eating dinner, Pam tried to talk to her husband about the situation with her boss and his haircut, but then her husband tried to help her solve the problem and she felt frustrated and they got into a disagreement. They spent most of the remaining night quietly watching TV together.

She went to bed early because she had a headache and knew the next day was going to have a lot of tasks. Pam tells me that she feels awful because she knows that she was overly upset with her husband, and that he did not deserve that, but she has felt so ramped up lately. She thinks that she may be stressed about her sister’s baby shower coming up. She is grateful that she gets to hide behind the “Good Hostess” act so that she does not have to make small talk with her sister’s intense friends. But Pam is worried that her mom is going to critique the theme that she chose. Pam concluded by looking at me and saying with tears in her eyes, “I am just tired of feeling tired and overthinking everything.”

This is Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The mind with this mental health illness can sound like wild ivy, expanding quickly and seemingly without consent. Anxiety disorders create a garden roller coaster of sorts, taking their rule-abiding passenger on a ride through shades of green and paths that lead nowhere. The passenger knows that it is a little odd that they mentally are working so hard, but they may not know how to stop the ride from happening. In Pam’s story, the reader may have noticed that her thoughts seemed to go fuzzy at times, blocking flexibility and narrowing her vision into distorted ways of understanding her experience.

Can Generalized Anxiety Disorder be Treated?

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), approximately 3% of adults in the United States are affected by Generalized Anxiety Disorder and approximately 18% are affected by some type of anxiety disorder. The larger umbrella of anxiety disorders are the single most common mental health problem in the United States. Generalized Anxiety Disorder can begin at any point in one’s life and can last between six months to a lifetime. While mental health clinicians, doctors, and researchers agree that anxiety disorders are highly treatable, current surveys report that only ⅓ of people affected seek treatment.

It may be helpful to think about how you were as a child. Many people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder as children asked a lot of “What if?” questions. They may have been very concerned with “adult problems” and would eavesdrop to make sure that they knew what was going on. Other common characteristics include low risk taking, a constant need for reassurance, sleep difficulties, frequent tummy aches, over-responsibility, and perfectionist thinking. Did any of these sound like you when you were little? Did you talk to anyone about your concerns? If so, what kind of response did you get? This data helps create a story about how you may now see your role in relationships, and can be immensely helpful in changing harmful patterns.

All of this may seem overwhelming, especially if you are reading this article and realizing that you may have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. If that is you, I already like you. The fact that you have exerted the energy to change your situation by investigating therapists and are reading articles as a method of self education to better understand how to improve, is notable. You are brave, you are determined, you will be okay. You just need a new set of skills. Anxiety does not have to be crippling.

Christian Counseling for Anxiety

As a Christian counselor, I understand the difficulty that the church has with anxiety. In the Bible, God tells us (multiple times) to not worry. What do we do with our present day anxieties when we know that God does not want us to fret? Is the constant worry that someone with Generalized Anxiety Disorder exhibits a sin? Does your faith feel like a resource or more like an omniscient power being constantly disappointed by your behavior?

For Christians, this topic can feel extra heavy. We know that in Philippians 4:6 we are encouraged, “Do not worry about anything.” In Hebrews 13:6, we are told that the Lord is our helper and therefore we should not fear. In Psalm 34:4, we learn that if we seek the Lord, we will be delivered from our fears. Perhaps most popularly we read in Matthew 6:34, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Sometimes Christians are led to feel that they are even worse creatures because they are not just anxious people, but they lack faith. They know that God will care for them, but seem to lack the ability to hand their worries over to Him. For now, all I have to say to this is that God is forgiving, loving, knows the struggle of humanity, and does not wish for us to be living in shame. That internal critic keeps us from running into His arms.

In session, I help clients manage their anxiety with new skills. Clients report feeling not only more free and able to accomplish their goals, but also tell me that they now know how to address the parts of them that get kicked into overdrive, and have developed ways to regulate those parts back to homeostasis. If you feel that you may be struggling with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I encourage you to seek counseling. You do not have to do this alone.