5 Graphs to Help You Understand What Anxiety Feels Like

October 22, 2015 • By Valerie Borden, MPA, Senior Health Education Specialist, Office on Women's Health

Ed. note: This blog post has been adapted from a BuzzFeed post. The original post was posted on July 29, 2015. Read the original post.

Anxiety is a feeling of nervousness, worry, or fear that helps you cope with an event or situation. It's a completely normal response to stress. But when it negatively affects your day-to-day life, it can be disabling. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in the United States — and affect more than twice as many women as men. How an anxiety disorder is treated depends on the person, but there are some things that many people with anxiety disorders have in common.

Anna Borges created some simple graphs to help people who don't have an anxiety disorder understand a little more about the experiences of people who do.

So many stereotypes: