Generalized Anxiety: When Worry Starts to Take Over
- Dr. Nathan J. Cooper
- Nov 17
- 3 min read
Do you ever worry that you worry too much? Once you start worrying, do you find it difficult to stop? If you answered yes, you may already sense that your worry is something worth addressing. While many anxiety symptoms, like heart palpitations, chest tightness, sweating, or muscle tension are hard to ignore, generalized anxiety tends to work more quietly. It’s subtle and persistent, the psychological version of “death by a thousand papercuts.”
Most people understand simple phobias: anxiety spikes when faced with a clear and visible threat such as a spider, snake, or dog. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), on the other hand, is rooted in the unknown. It’s less like a fear of something specific and more like an allergy to uncertainty.
Why Generalized Anxiety Feels So Overwhelming
GAD fixates on the areas of life where worry feels justified: education, career, finances, health, and relationships. In other words, anything connected to our basic security or socioeconomic stability.
Worry often follows a chain of “what if” thoughts that snowball into worst-case scenarios. I sometimes call this the “seven steps to death” pattern:
“What if I fail the test… don’t do well in this class… get bad grades… don’t get a good job… don’t make good money… never meet the right people… and end up living in my parents’ basement?”
Or the health version: “What if that spot is something serious… what if it’s cancer… what if I need surgery or chemo… what if I never recover… what if I’m alone in the hospital… and eventually die alone and get eaten by my cats?”
These leaps in logic are extreme, but when you’re caught in a cycle of generalized anxiety, they feel surprisingly believable.
How Chronic Worry Impacts Your Body and Mind
When catastrophe always feels just around the corner, the body stays in a state of persistent tension. This is why GAD is linked to symptoms such as:
Fatigue
Muscle tension
Irritability
Trouble concentrating
Sleep disturbances
Heightened anxiety or panic-like sensations
A psychologist trained in anxiety treatment will often see these symptoms long before a patient realizes how much worry is shaping their daily life.
How Psychologists Treat Generalized Anxiety
Because generalized anxiety shares features with other anxiety conditions, effective treatment often includes:
Emotion Regulation
Learning to recognize emotional patterns, reduce reactivity, and manage overwhelm.
Systematic Desensitization
Gradually confronting feared situations or thoughts in a controlled way.
Prolonged Exposure
This technique is especially important for GAD because the fear is usually about future events. Exposure involves writing a vivid, present-tense scenario describing the feared situation, something believable yet anxiety-provoking, and revisiting it repeatedly.
Over time, this repeated exposure reduces the body’s overactive fear response (habituation).
The goal isn’t to convince yourself that bad things never happen. It’s to understand that:
We are notoriously poor at predicting the future.
We are far more resilient than we believe.
We have the skills to cope with difficult situations when they arise.
For more information, a helpful resource is the work of Dr. Michel Dugas, available through Anxiety Canada. ( https://www.anxietycanada.com/sites/default/files/adult_hmgad.pdf )
Ready to Start Reducing Your Anxiety?
If you’re struggling with overwhelming worry, persistent “what if” thoughts, or symptoms of generalized anxiety, support is available. Working with a psychologist or psychotherapist can help you break free from the cycle of chronic worry and build a calmer, more confident future.
Book your appointment below by filling out the contact form.
A healthier, less anxious life is completely within reach.
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