The term anxiety disorder is a term for a number of psychiatric disorders . These disorders can be classified into two very broad groups:

1. Disorders that are marked by extreme worry about the past, present or future.
2. Disorders that are marked by fear of a given object or situation.

Anxiety conditions include phobia , social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder . Other anxiety disorders include agoraphobia and panic disorder . Stress from life events, including past abuse, being intimidated or health worries, can trigger anxiety problems for many people. Symptoms include headache , spasms in the muscle , trembling, fatigue and exhaustion. There are various manners for treating anxiety disorders. These include medication and therapy. There is some recent research. ^[1]

When people talk about feeling, they use the words anxiety and fear without making much of a difference. When professionals talk about them, there is a difference, though: Fear always has a cause, people are afraid of something or of something happening. So fear is the emotional response to an external threat. ^[2] Anxiety is more general, the cause is either not known, or not controllable easily.

Both fear and anxiety are normal reactions, to protect against a threat. Someone feeling fear or anxiety now and then does not have an anxiety disorder. Only when they occur so often that they impact people's lives do they become a disorder.

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