Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is the name given to any form of anxiety, severe worry or panic – where the individual can’t specifically say what is causing their overwhelming emotions or fear-based responses.
What is GAD?
GAD is one of the common forms of anxiety and often affects people who are quite clever, logical and rational; because of their intelligence, it becomes very scary and confusing about what is wrong with them and what they need to do to overcome the anxious feelings.
Another name for this is Free Floating Anxiety, and it keeps you on edge with your anxious or panicky feelings never far away – this continued worry leaves the experiencer feeling drained and exhausted.
After prolonged exposure to generalised anxiety disorder, the person becomes more and more indecisive and worried about new situations or experiences, and this leads them to doubt themselves and reduce their confidence.
Waking up feeling anxious
Often, a person with generalised anxiety awakes in the morning already feeling quite anxious. This can be very distressing as they don’t know what they are actually worried about – and this often causes more worry, thus more anxiety.
In reality, anxious (and depressed) people dream much more than calm people. I think it is because their brains are looking for solutions to their life problems during those dreams. When a person dreams, their body responds to those dreams as if they were true – like waking up from a nightmare or having an erotic dream.
Therefore, as they awaken after the longest bout of dreaming (which occurs just before we wake up), their body is pumped full of adrenalin from those dreams, though they may not remember them.
As they learn to worry less and sort out their lives, this all backs off