Most people know what it’s like to feel anxious. That tension in your muscles, those butterflies in your stomach, and the drumming of your heart tells you that you’re not calm. And this is totally normal. Where would we be if genuinely dangerous situations like dark alleys at night didn’t give us the heebie-jeebies? And would we take important tasks very seriously if we didn’t get nervous in the spotlight, like when giving a wedding toast?
Sometimes, anxiety goes too far and gets in the way of our everyday functioning. It can mess up our health, relationships, work, and fun. It’s not hard to imagine the pain of being plagued by non-stop worries or feeling so shy as to have trouble with dating. But sometimes, anxiety and anxiety-related processes can show up in more unusual ways, even ways that don’t seem at first to have anything to do with emotions.
The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual - 5th Edition is the official American Psychiatric Association’s list of psychological disorders. It’s a huge bible detailing everything that’s considered a disorder and how it’s categorized. It takes experts years to update it in response to ongoing scientific findings.
The Anxiety Disorders section got a big makeover in the last update, which came out in 2013. It’s now split into a few different sections, including Trauma and Stress-Related Disorders and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders. Some of the less common disorders got shuffled around, some got new names, but experts still agree that the line between categories is blurry at best. Overlapping and related to some of the most common anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder, are some that are less well-known.
Let’s talk about three little-known disorders related to anxiety. They’re rare, but for those who have them, they’re very real and disruptive. We’ll take a look at what they are, where they come from, and how they might be treated.