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Mental Health

Overcoming Anxiety

Summary & Participants

We've all experienced anxiety at one time or another, and a little anxiety never hurt anyone. But too much anxiety can interfere with your ability to function in the everyday world, and may have harmful consequences on your body. Join our panel of experts as they discuss anxiety and offer some helpful tips on how to overcome it.

Medically Reviewed On: June 12, 2006

Webcast Transcript

PAUL MONIZ: I'm Paul Moniz. Thank you for joining us. If you feel stressed out from time to time consider yourself normal. The demands of the business world, parenting and modern-day life are enough to drive just about anyone over the edge. But being stressed out is certainly different from suffering from clinical anxiety. Many people can weather even heavy stress; some even thrive on it. But sometimes the stress crosses the line to anxiety and knowing the warning signs could mean the difference between hopelessness and relative normalcy with treatment.

Here to talk about that are two clinical psychologists who work together. We have Dr. Fran Massino and Dr. Willy Wiener. Both are from the Institute for Performance Advancement in Manhattan and both deal with stress and anxiety in the workplace.

Dr. Wiener, let's begin with you regarding anxiety. What is the difference, clinically, between stress and anxiety?

WILLY WIENER, PhD: When someone is really suffering from an anxiety problem, they tend to experience a variety of physiological symptoms such as excessive sweating, heart palpitations. Tremors in their hands, sweaty palms. There are a whole host of physiological symptoms that go along with that and they tend to avoid things. When you really have an anxiety disorder your functioning is impaired by that disorder as opposed to when you are stressed out you tend to push on through.

PAUL MONIZ: Are these so-called panic attacks that are commonly used, at least the term?

WILLY WIENER, PhD: One can have an anxiety disorder and not have panic attacks, and one can have panic attacks without having the anxiety disorder. Although if you have frequent panic attacks, that would qualify you for an anxiety disorder. Panic attacks are characterized by short shallow breathing. People tend to get too much oxygen in their brain and experience something that makes them feel sort of woozy. They feel as if the walls are closing in on them, that they don't have enough air to breath, that they are going to die in the moment. And then they begin to avoid situations where those panic attacks take place.

PAUL MONIZ: Dr. Massino, let's talk about some of that avoidance. What kinds of things do people avoid, and if someone watching our program is perhaps a spouse or partner of that person, what should they be looking for?

FRANCIS MASSINO, PhD: A lot of times it can start even with students in high school where there is a big term paper that is anxiety provoking. So there may be procrastination, putting off beginning, getting organized. At work it could be avoiding preparing for a meeting or it could be calling in sick the morning of a scheduled meeting with the boss because you're really apprehensive to negotiate for a raise or to ask for additional vacation time.

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