Anxiety: Notes From Opq

Generalized anxiety disorder is worry that runs most days for six months or more, across several parts of life, with physical signs such as restlessness, fatigue, poor concentration, irritability, muscle tension and disturbed sleep.

Also called: GAD, Generalised anxiety disorder, Chronic anxiety.

ICD-10 F41.1 · ICD-11 6B00

Personal reflections, not clinical guidance, and not a substitute for any of it. Just what I keep thinking about while building this.

September 2026

On building the opposite of condition 01

The depression exhibit is a body damped past the point where it can ring. You can strike it as hard as you like and it will not make a sound.

This one had to fail in the opposite direction, and that was the harder thing to build. It is not louder. It is not faster. It simply never comes down. It is a structure that branches whenever you answer it, and only settles if you leave it completely alone.

The interaction that refuses you

Every other object on this site rewards attention. This one does the opposite, on purpose. Press a tip and it flares, which feels good. Then it forks into three where it would have made two.

I went back and forth on whether that was too clever. I kept it for one reason. It is the thing the people closest to this condition get wrong most often. Being told is not the same as doing it yourself and watching it get worse in your hand.

On the amygdala

I had written the pathophysiology tab around an overactive alarm before I read the scans properly. The finding does not hold up in this condition. Sometimes the amygdala is overactive. Sometimes it is underactive. Sometimes there is no difference at all.

I nearly left it out. "The research disagrees with itself" is not a satisfying thing to put on a page. Then it became the first stage, for the same reason the serotonin story opens the depression tab. The most useful thing a page like this can do is say which parts are actually settled.

Why the treatment tab is not a scrubber

The depression tab has a timeline you drag. The thing worth knowing there is a gap in time that nobody explains to you.

There is no gap like that here. What matters here is a prediction you must commit to before you are allowed to see the answer. A belief only moves when something disagrees with it. Nothing can disagree with a belief you never said out loud.