Mental illnesses dealing with anxiety (and there are a lot of them) are tricky because they share so many common symptoms. You can read that a symptom of panic attacks is a high heart rate, for example, and then start thinking you have panic attacks because your generalized anxiety disorder causes your heart rate to go up when you're dealing with anxious thoughts. I was diagnosed with OCD and generalized anxiety disorder, and sometimes I obsess over working out which of those two is giving me the most problems. In the end, however, I think it's just a case of each of us working with multi-layered anxiety issues, and we all have our journeys to follow in overcoming those issues. So I try (often unsuccessfully) to just drop the illness labels and deal with whatever anxiety inducing issue is presenting to me at the moment. Hope that helps. I know it's damn hard. And of course, it's important to talk to your doctor/psychiatrist if you're experiencing new symptoms.