Mental HealthPending review

Generalised Anxiety Disorder

Chronic, free-floating worry that is out of proportion to circumstance and is driven by a threat-detection system stuck in the 'on' position, producing both psychological and autonomic symptoms.

First principles

GAD is a miscalibrated threat-detection system

Normal anxiety is adaptive: the amygdala flags potential threat and the prefrontal cortex appraises it and switches the alarm off once it is judged safe. In GAD this circuit is miscalibrated: the amygdala is hyper-responsive and top-down prefrontal inhibition is weak, so the alarm fires at low thresholds and fails to reset. The result is worry that is free-floating (not tied to a specific object as in a phobia) and persistent, because the 'all-clear' signal never reliably arrives.

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Educational content pending clinical review. Not medical advice.