Q.Describe the symptoms of any two anxiety disorders.

Anxiety Disorder Criteria – From Intuition to Precision

Everyone feels anxious sometimes. That knot in your stomach before an exam, the racing heart before a speech, the restless night before a big decision — these are normal, even useful. Anxiety is your brain's alarm system, alerting you to potential danger and preparing your body to respond. It sharpens focus, boosts energy, and helps you perform.

But what happens when the alarm keeps ringing when there is no fire? When the feeling of dread shows up without a clear trigger, or lingers long after the threat is gone, or is so intense that it stops you from living your life? That is when normal anxiety crosses into an anxiety disorder.

The key difference is not the presence of anxiety — it is whether the anxiety is excessive, uncontrollable, and impairing.

The Intuitive Core: Three Questions

To decide if anxiety has become a disorder, ask three simple questions:

1. Is the anxiety out of proportion?

   A mild worry about a minor exam is normal. Crippling terror about a routine class presentation is not.

2. Can the person control it?

   Normal anxiety fades when the situation ends. In a disorder, the person feels helpless — the anxiety comes and stays despite knowing it is irrational.

3. Does it interfere with life?

   Avoiding social events, skipping classes, losing sleep, or being unable to work because of anxiety signals a problem.

If the answer to all three is "yes" for a sustained period, you are looking at a disorder.

The Precise Statement: DSM-5 Criteria

The standard diagnostic framework (DSM-5) defines Generalized Anxiety Disorder as a representative example. The criteria are:

Breaking Down Each Criterion

Criterion A – Duration and Pervasiveness

The worry must be present more days than not for at least 6 months. This rules out temporary stress reactions. The worry is also about multiple domains — not just one specific thing (that would be a phobia).

Criterion B – Lack of Control

This is the hallmark. The person knows the worry is excessive but cannot stop it. It is not a choice; it is a symptom.

Criterion C – Somatic and Cognitive Symptoms

Anxiety is not just in the mind — it lives in the body. The six symptoms listed are the most common physical and mental manifestations. A diagnosis requires three or more of these.

Criterion D – Functional Impairment

This is the most important practical test. Even if all other criteria are met, if the person can still function normally, it is not a disorder. The anxiety must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in real life — at work, in relationships, in daily tasks.

Criteria E and F – Exclusion

These ensure the anxiety is not caused by something else — a thyroid problem, caffeine intoxication, withdrawal from alcohol, or another mental disorder like depression or PTSD.

A Note on Other Anxiety Disorders …

Body Image Distortion – From Intuition to Precision

Imagine you look into a funhouse mirror at a carnival. The mirror bends your reflection — your legs look impossibly long, your torso squashed, your head enormous. You know it's a trick. The mirror is wrong, not you.

Now imagine that the distortion is inside your own mind. You look at your actual body — in a normal mirror, or even just feel it from the inside — and what you perceive does not match what is really there. That is the core of body image distortion.

It is not about vanity or "not liking" your body. It is a genuine mismatch between perception and reality. The person sees, feels, or believes their body to be different in size, shape, or parts than it objectively is.

The Intuition: A Broken Internal Map

Your brain builds a mental model of your body — a kind of internal map — using signals from your skin, muscles, joints, and eyes. This map tells you where your hand is even with your eyes closed, or whether you can fit through a doorway.

In body image distortion, that map is corrupted. The brain receives the same signals as anyone else, but it interprets them incorrectly. A person with anorexia nervosa, for example, may look at their emaciated arm and genuinely perceive it as fat. They are not lying. Their brain's body map says "fat," even though the scale and the tape measure say otherwise.

The Precise Statement

Body image distortion is a clinically significant discrepancy between a person's subjective perception, cognition, or affect regarding their own body and the objective physical reality of that body. It is most commonly studied in eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa) and body dysmorphic disorder, but can occur in other conditions as well.

It has two main components:

1. Perceptual distortion – The person sees or feels their body incorrectly. For example, overestimating the width of their hips or the size of their stomach.
2. Cognitive-affective distortion – The person holds irrational beliefs and intense negative feelings about their body shape or weight. For example, "I am disgustingly fat" despite being underweight. …