All of us know what anxiety is and we all experience it. You feel anxiety before you face an important exam, before you go on your first date with a certain girl, when your boss throws a fit, when you learn that your child has some kind of illness. Anxiety is not a bad thing, and anxiety can often motivate you to muster up the strength to deal with an impending crisis. However, if you have so much anxiety that you reach an anxiety disorder, it can have the opposite effect – it can prevent you from coping, from dealing with the crisis in front of you, and even from going about your daily life. If you have an anxiety disorder, you may feel anxious most of the time for no clear reason; you may feel that your anxiety is getting in the way of your life so much that you can’t actually do anything. When we say “anxiety” clinically, it refers to an unpleasant state of tension that has no clear cause. The term “anxiety disorder” refers to a large category of disorders, including not only what we normally refer to as anxiety disorders (in formal diagnosis, we call them general anxiety disorders), but also obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias, panic disorders, post-traumatic disorders, and so on. Here we are specifically talking about what we normally refer to as anxiety disorders, while discussing OCD, phobias, panic disorders, and post-traumatic disorders elsewhere. Anxiety disorders are a common psychological disorder that is more prevalent in women than in men. Epidemiological studies indicate that approximately 4.1% to 6.6% of the urban population will have anxiety disorders during their lifetime. The main symptom of anxiety disorders is that the patient is filled with excessive, prolonged, and vague anxiety and worry that do not have a clear cause. Although, these worries and anxieties resemble the normal, real crisis-induced worries and anxieties. For example, they may spend their days worrying about their family’s financial situation, even though they have well over six figures in their bank account; or they may spend their days worrying about their child’s safety, fearing that something will happen to him at school; more often than not, they themselves do not know for what, but just feel extremely anxious. The specific symptoms of anxiety and worry lasting more than six months include the following four categories: physical tension, overreactivity of the autonomic nervous system, nameless worries about the future, and excessive resourcefulness. These symptoms can occur separately or together. Physical tension: A person with anxiety often feels that he cannot relax and that his whole body is tense. His face is tense, his brow is furrowed, his expression is tense, and he sighs. Autonomic nervous system overreactivity: The sympathetic and sympathetic nervous system of the anxiety disorder patient is often overloaded. Patients experience sweating, dizziness, shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, chills and fever, cold hands and feet or fever, stomach difficulties, excessive urination and defecation, and a feeling of obstruction in the throat. Unnamed worries about the future: People with anxiety disorders are always worried about the future. They worry about their loved ones, their possessions, and their health. Excessive vigilance: People with anxiety disorders are like a soldier on sentry duty at all times, alert to every slightest movement in their surroundings. Because they are constantly on guard, it affects all their other tasks and even their sleep. The cause of anxiety disorders has not been clarified so far. Treatment methods mainly include psychotherapy and medication.