When people say "I've had anxiety for 2 years" or "my anxiety has been really bad for 2 years" are they talking about constant anxiety that ocurrs every day of their lives and lasts all day and every day or are they talking about anxiety that comes maybe 2-3 times and lasts for just a few days during those two years?.

I would have bouts of anxiety (usually due to some trigger event) that would last for weeks or months at a time where I was almost totally incapacitated and the anxiety was with me from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. Then it would dissapear for a few weeks or months only to rear it's ugly head again and last for another few weeks or several months.

Is this what people mean when they say "I've had anxiety for 2 years"?. Is it an EVERYDAY thing that you have to live with (ie; chronic) or does it just pop up every now and then?. I can't think of any other way to ask this but I'll try again...

Do you wake up every morning with anxiety and go to bed every night with anxiety and has this lasted for a minimum of 6 months to a year or longer and you can't cope without medication and/or therapy?.

Here's another way of looking at it...

John has anxiety problems. Sometimes certain things will trigger him and he'll worry himself into a frenzy until he feels like a bundle of nerves. Sometimes John looks up symptoms on the internet and becomes even more fearful that he has some incurable disease that will never be detected. John wakes up anxious every morning and goes to bed anxious every night. One day John gets a new job and as he works at his new jobs and starts meeting new people, his mind is less focused more and more on his "disease" until finally he completely forgets about it and figures that if it did'nt kill him by now, then it's not going to kill him at all.

Jane is a different story. Unlike John who has bouts of trigger-induced anxiety, Jane's anxiety is always constant and never seems to go away without medication. In fact, she has begun to just see herself as a "nervous person". Several months after her anxiety had struck particulary hard and she had been on medication for several months, Jane decided to try to go off of her medication to see if she had been "cured". She was not cured and quickly begantaking her medication again. Jane knows that this a chronic, life-long disease and that unless she stays on the medication for the rest of her life, she will always have anxiety (at somelevel) until the day she dies.

So which are you?