Many people with an anxiety disorder, particularly General Anxiety Disorder, will experience symptoms of many other disorders. One of the most common symptoms that GAD sufferers experience is Agoraphobia. Sufferers of this phobia will often find it impossible to leave the house. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, sufferers often feel that their home is their safety zone, and by leaving their home they are putting themselves at great risk. The way that this phobia works is almost like OCD in that the sufferer will often experience repetitive thoughts about why they shouldn’t leave the house.
Many sufferers worry about different things that stop them leaving the house. For example, they may worry that they will suffer a panic attack in public, and that they would make a fool of themselves or not be able tog et out of the situation. Other people may worry that they are going to have a heart attack or something similar in the street and nobody will be there to help them. Other common worries include vomiting, having a seizure, falling ill, fainting, or saying the wrong thing. All of these worries are incredibly common.
One of the most important things for Agoraphobia sufferers to remember is that avoidance will not help, it will only make recovery harder in the long run. One thing that may help is exposure therapy. By proving to themselves that the things that they fear are very unlikely to happen, the sufferer will gradually start to gain confidence and begin feeling better about leaving the house by themselves. It can be very difficult for a sufferer to do this, so those around them need to be patient and let them do it in their own time, because if they are pushed it is unlikely to help at all.
Another thing that could help is the “So what” way of thinking. This is basically thinking about all of the bad things that could happen, and then thinking “so what”. For example, if the sufferer worried about having a panic attack in a public place then they would respond to that thought with a “so what” attitude. The worst that can happen is that somebody looks at them while they are having a panic attack, or that somebody asks if they are OK and tries to help them. The same method can be put into practice for most worries.
A final technique that can be used is deep breathing. Most anxiety sufferers find themselves hyperventilating for a lot of the day without even realising it. When you are not breathing properly you start to experience all kinds of symptoms which then feeds in to the anxiety itself and leads to a vicious circle. Once this cycle is broken with healthy breathing techniques the sufferer will start to feel a lot better. Deep breathing is the easiest way of doing this as it allows the sufferer to regulate their breathing pattern meaning that they are less likely to panic.