- attacked
- deceived
- frustrated
- invalidated or unfairly treated
It isn’t necessarily a ‘bad’ emotion; in fact it can sometimes be useful. For example, feeling angry about something can:
- help us identify problems or things that are hurting us
- motivate us to create change, achieve our goals and move on
- help us stay safe and defend ourselves in dangerous situations by giving us a burst of energy as part of our fight or flight system
Most people will experience episodes of anger which feel manageable and don’t have a big impact on their lives. Learning healthy ways to recognise, express and deal with anger is important for our mental and physical health.
Anxiety is a natural human response when we feel that we are under threat. It can be experienced through our thoughts, feelings and physical sensations.
- manic or hypomanic episodes (feeling high)
- depressive episodes (feeling low)
- potentially some psychotic symptoms during manic or depressed episodes
You might hear these different experiences referred to as mood states, and you can read more about them in our page on bipolar moods and symptoms.
Everyone has variations in their mood, but in bipolar disorder these changes can be very distressing and have a big impact on your life. You may feel that your high and low moods are extreme, and that swings in your mood are overwhelming.
Depending on the way you experience these mood states, and how severely they affect you, your doctor may diagnose you with a particular type of bipolar disorder.
You might be given a diagnosis of BDD if you:
- experience obsessive worries about one or more perceived flaws in your physical appearance, and the flaw cannot be seen by others or appears very slight
- develop compulsive behaviours and routines, such as excessive use of mirrors or picking your skin, to deal with the worries you have about the way you look.
If you have BDD, these obsessions and behaviours cause emotional distress and have a significant impact on your ability to carry on with your day-to-day life. In this way, BDD is closely related to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
BDD can vary in severity from person to person and from day to day. For some of us, concerns around appearance may make it difficult to go out in public or see other people. This can have an impact on our work life and relationships with other people.
You might be diagnosed with a personality disorder if you have difficulties with how you think and feel about yourself and other people, and are having problems in your life as a result.
In its mildest form, depression can mean just being in low spirits. It doesn’t stop you leading your normal life but makes everything harder to do and seem less worthwhile. At its most severe, depression can be life-threatening because it can make you feel suicidal.
If you dissociate, you may feel disconnected from yourself and the world around you. For example, you may feel detached from your body or feel as though the world around you is unreal. Remember, everyone’s experience of dissociation is different.
Dissociation is one way the mind copes with too much stress, such as during a traumatic event.
Experiences of dissociation can last for a relatively short time (hours or days) or for much longer (weeks or months).
If you dissociate for a long time, especially when you are young, you may develop a dissociative disorder. Instead of dissociation being something you experience for a short time it becomes a far more common experience, and is often the main way you deal with stressful experiences.
- to give themselves a pleasurable experience
- to help them feel better if they are having a bad time
- because their friends are using them
- to see what it feels like.
They include alcohol, tobacco (nicotine), substances such as cannabis, heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, and some prescribed medicines.
Many people think that someone with an eating problem will be over or underweight. People might also think that certain weights are linked to certain eating problems. Neither of these points are true.
Anyone can experience eating problems. This is regardless of age, gender, weight or background.
Food plays a significant part in our lives. Most of us will spend time thinking about what we eat. Sometimes you might:
- have cravings
- eat more than usual
- lose your appetite
- try to eat healthier.
Changing your eating habits like this every now and again is normal.
But if you feel like food and eating is taking over your life, it may become a problem.
People have many different experiences of hearing voices. Some people don’t mind their voices or simply find them irritating or distracting, while others find them frightening or intrusive.
It’s common to think that if you hear voices you must have a mental health problem.
But research shows that lots of people hear voices and many of them are not mentally unwell. It’s a relatively common human experience.
Hoarding is acquiring or saving lots of things regardless of their value.
If you hoard, you might:
- have very strong positive feelings whenever you get more items
- feel very upset or anxious at the thought of throwing or giving things away
- find it very hard to decide what to keep or get rid of.
People might disagree on what is hoarding and whether it’s causing problems for you. Someone else (such as a friend, family member or healthcare professional) might say you are hoarding when you don’t think you are.
- Hypomania is a milder version of mania that lasts for a short period (usually a few days)
- Mania is a more severe form that lasts for a longer period (a week or more)
You might have hypomania and/or mania on their own or as part of some mental health problems – including bipolar disorder, seasonal affective disorder, postpartum psychosis or schizoaffective disorder.
Some people find hypomania and mania enjoyable. Or you might find them very uncomfortable, distressing or unpleasant.
One common description of loneliness is the feeling we get when our need for rewarding social contact and relationships is not met. But loneliness is not always the same as being alone.
You may choose to be alone and live happily without much contact with other people, while others may find this a lonely experience.
Or you may have lots of social contact, or be in a relationship or part of a family, and still feel lonely – especially if you don’t feel understood or cared for by the people around you (see our information on the causes of loneliness).
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has two main parts: obsessions and compulsions.
- Obsessions are unwelcome thoughts, images, urges, worries or doubts that repeatedly appear in your mind. They can make you feel very anxious (although some people describe it as ‘mental discomfort’ rather than anxiety). You can read more about obsessions here.
- Compulsions are repetitive activities that you do to reduce the anxiety caused by the obsession. It could be something like repeatedly checking a door is locked, repeating a specific phrase in your head or checking how your body feels. You can read more about compulsions here.
You might find that sometimes your obsessions and compulsions are manageable, and at other times they may make your day-to-day life really difficult. They may be more severe when you are stressed about other things, like life changes, health, money, work or relationships.
Panic attacks are a type of fear response. They’re an exaggeration of your body’s normal response to danger, stress or excitement.
During a panic attack, physical symptoms can build up very quickly. These can include:
- a pounding or racing heartbeat
- feeling faint, dizzy or light-headed
- feeling very hot or very cold
- sweating, trembling or shaking
- nausea (feeling sick)
- pain in your chest or abdomen
- struggling to breathe or feeling like you’re choking
- feeling like your legs are shaky or are turning to jelly
- feeling disconnected from your mind, body or surroundings, which are types of dissociation.
During a panic attack you might feel very afraid that you’re:
- losing control
- going to faint
- having a heart attack
- going to die.
Paranoid thoughts could also be exaggerated suspicions. For example, someone made a nasty comment about you once, and you believe that they are directing a hate campaign against you.
We don’t always think, feel and behave in exactly the same way – it depends on the situation we are in, the people with us and many other interconnecting factors.
However, if you experience significant difficulties in how you relate to yourself and others and have problems coping day to day, you may receive a diagnosis of personality disorder.
A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder. It is an extreme form of fear or anxiety, triggered by a particular situation or object.
- A situation that triggers a phobia. You may know it’s safe to be out on a balcony in a high-rise block, but feel terrified to go out on it. You might not even be able to enjoy the view from behind the windows inside the building.
- An object that triggers a phobia. You may know that a spider isn’t poisonous or that it won’t bite you, but this still doesn’t reduce your anxiety.
You may even feel this extreme anxiety when you think or talk about the situation or object.
Many of us have fears about particular situations or objects. This is perfectly normal. A fear becomes a phobia if:
- the fear is out of proportion to the danger
- it lasts for more than six months
- it has a significant impact on how you live your day-to-day life.
Having a baby is a big life event. It’s natural to experience a range of emotions during pregnancy and after giving birth. But if any difficult feelings start to have a big effect on your day-to-day life, you might be experiencing a perinatal mental health problem.
This may be new mental health problem, or an episode of a problem you’ve experienced in the past.
If you experience depression while you are pregnant or after giving birth, this may be known as:
- antenatal depression – while you are pregnant
- postnatal depression (PND) – during roughly the first year after giving birth
- perinatal depression – any time from becoming pregnant to around one year after giving birth.
Lots of people are aware of postnatal depression. But it is less known that many people experience antenatal depression, and some people may experience both.
- attacked
- deceived
- frustrated
- invalidated or unfairly treated
It isn’t necessarily a ‘bad’ emotion; in fact it can sometimes be useful. For example, feeling angry about something can:
- help us identify problems or things that are hurting us
- motivate us to create change, achieve our goals and move on
- help us stay safe and defend ourselves in dangerous situations by giving us a burst of energy as part of our fight or flight system
Most people will experience episodes of anger which feel manageable and don’t have a big impact on their lives. Learning healthy ways to recognise, express and deal with anger is important for our mental and physical health.
The most common types of psychotic experiences are hallucinations, delusions and disorganised thinking and speech.
Psychosis affects people in different ways. You might experience it once, have short episodes throughout your life, or live with it most of the time.
The word schizoaffective has two parts:
- ‘schizo–‘ refers to psychotic symptoms
- ‘–affective’ refers to mood symptoms.
You might have times when you struggle to look after yourself, or when your doctors consider that you lack insight into your behaviour and how you are feeling. But you may also have times between episodes where you feel well too.
Episodes can vary in length. Some people have repeated episodes, but this does not necessarily happen for everybody. Symptoms usually start when you are a young adult.
Some people have suggested that schizoaffective disorder sits in the middle of a continuum, with schizophrenia at one end and bipolar disorder at the other. However, schizoaffective disorder is recognised as a separate diagnosis to both schizophrenia and bipolar, despite sharing many similar symptoms.
If you have SAD, you’ll experience depression during some seasons in particular, or because of certain types of weather.
Your self-esteem can affect whether you:
- like and value yourself as a person
- are able to make decisions and assert yourself
- recognise your strengths and positives
- feel able to try new or difficult things
- show kindness towards yourself
- move past mistakes without blaming yourself unfairly
- take the time you need for yourself
- believe you matter and are good enough
- believe you deserve happiness.
- express something that is hard to put into words
- turn invisible thoughts or feelings into something visible
- change emotional pain into physical pain
- reduce overwhelming emotional feelings or thoughts
- have a sense of being in control
- escape traumatic memories
- have something in life that they can rely on
- punish themselves for their feelings and experiences
- stop feeling numb, disconnected or dissociated (see dissocation and dissociative disorders)
- create a reason to physically care for themselves
- express suicidal feelings and thoughts without taking their own life.
After self-harming you may feel a short-term sense of release, but the cause of your distress is unlikely to have gone away. Self-harm can also bring up very difficult emotions and could make you feel worse.
Even though there are always reasons underneath someone hurting themselves, it is important to know that self-harm does carry risks. Once you have started to depend on self-harm, it can take a long time to stop.
You might:
- find it hard to fall asleep, stay asleep or wake up earlier than you’d like to (also known as insomnia)
- have problems that disturb your sleep, such as panic attacks, flashbacks, nightmares or psychosis
- find it hard to wake up or get out of bed
- often feel tired or sleepy – this could be because you’re not sleeping enough, not getting good quality sleep or because of health problems
- sleep a lot – which could include sleeping at times when you want, or need, to be awake.
- Situations or events that put pressure on us – for example, times where we have lots to do and think about, or don’t have much control over what happens.
- Our reaction to being placed under pressure – the feelings we get when we have demands placed on us that we find difficult to cope with.
Suicidal feelings can mean having abstract thoughts about ending your life or feeling that people would be better off without you. Or it can mean thinking about methods of suicide or making clear plans to take your own life.
If you are feeling suicidal, you might be scared or confused by these feelings. You may find the feelings overwhelming.
But you are not alone. Many people think about suicide at some point in their lifetime.
- ‘Tardive’ means delayed or appearing late (because it usually only develops after you’ve been taking medication for at least a few months and sometimes years).
- ‘Dyskinesia’ means abnormal or unusual movements.
Awareness of TD has improved over the years, but unfortunately doctors don’t always remember to tell people about this risk when they prescribe antipsychotics.
- situations or events we find traumatic
- how we’re affected by our experiences.
Traumatic events can happen at any age and can cause long-lasting harm. Everyone has a different reaction to trauma, so you might notice any effects quickly, or a long time afterwards.