The short and obvious answer: panic attacks are caused by high anxiety. But, what exactly is anxiety? Understanding how anxiety crops up will help you defeat panic attacks.
Fortunately, contrary to many myths, anxiety cannot harm you and it cannot lead to any life threatening conditions. It can and does make you feel bad, but cannot cause you physical harm. Though that doesn’t really help when you’re experiencing it.
What is Anxiety
It’s actually one of the most common emotions we feel as human beings, and serves to protect us from potentially hazardous situations. It’s also that state we experience when we’re anticipating a real or imagined threat.
Only people who have experienced a panic attack first hand really understand the terrifying nature of the experience. The racing heart rate, blurred vision, dizziness, tingling or “pins and needles” sensations in your hands, arms and/or legs, and breathlessness. And that’s just for starters.
When you go through these experiences, it’s very easy to feel like you’re losing control, which is a very scary feeling in itself. To make matters worse, you can’t really understand why this happening to you, and whether or not you’re actually experiencing a more serious medical condition like a heart attack.
Fight or Flight Response: One of the root causes of panic attacks?
Most everyone has heard of the fight or flight response that we humans have as a reason for panic attacks. The question to ask yourself is do you feel a connection between the unusual feelings you experience during your panic attack?
Anxiety, and the ensuing panic attack is a response to a real (or imagined) potentially dangerous situation – its main function is to protect us from danger. Quite ironic perhaps, seeing as the anxiety is actually making us feel very frightened.
If we go back several millennia, back to our ancient ancestors, their anxiety basically kept them alive – determining whether they fled or fought when faced with danger. It’s an automatic response that took control and tried to keep them safe. It helps us respond to these dangerous situations literally within a split second – virtually instantaneously.
The brain will send a signal to the nervous system when danger presents itself. The nervous system then gets the body ready to act as well as helps the body to restore to a homeostatic state. In order to make sure that these necessary functions are carried out our autonomic nervous system is made up of two subsections called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems.
The main duty of the sympathetic system is to release adrenaline, this is the messenger in our body that keeps us going. The parasympathetic system then is called into action after a period of time to restore balance to the body once danger is gone. The parasympathetic nervous system is the part of the nervous system that gets us to calm down and relax.
Your Body Will Always Strive To Remain Calm
Whenever you use some form of “coping strategy” that you may have been taught for controlling your attacks, it’s the parasympathetic system that you are calling into action. One thing worth remembering is that this system will always be brought into action at some point during your anxiety attacks whether you call it into action or not. It’s a built in protection system we posses which helps us survive.
The next time you have a panic attack you need to remember that it is not possible physically for the anxiety that you are feeling to cause you any bodily harm. The mind might make the feelings go on longer then what your body wanted them to, but balance will return. The fact of the matter is that our bodies are constantly striving to attain balance or homeostasis.
Something you may find interesting about our in-built fight or flight system, is that your blood is channelled away from areas where it is not vital, and pumped into areas where it may be required urgently.
A prime example is when we are anticipating some form of physical attack – whether it’s a response to an attacker coming at us with a knife, or being confronted by a sabre toothed tiger. Blood will be “pulled” from extremities like fingers, toes and the skin, and pumped into the major muscle groups like the legs and arms, to help your body prepare for action – whatever that action may be.
This is why many people feel numbness and tingling during a panic attack – often misinterpreted as some serious health risk-such as the precursor to a heart attack. If you are really worried that such is the case with your situation, visit your doctor and have it checked out. At least then you can put your mind at rest.
Panic Attacks Cause Fear of Suffocation
One of the scariest effects of a panic attack is the fear of suffocating or smothering. It is very common during a panic attack to feel tightness in the chest and throat. I’m sure everyone can relate to some fear of losing control of your breathing. From personal experience, anxiety grows from the fear that your breathing itself would cease and you would be unable to recover. Can a panic attack stop our breathing? No.
During a panic attack the rate at which we take a breath increases and those breaths are not as deep as they usually are. The rapid shallow breathing serves an important function as it gets more oxygen into our tissues so that they are prepared to act. This type of breathing though is often accompanied by feelings of breathlessness, hyperventilation or the feeling of choking and can also lead to chest pain and tightness.
On several occasions, during a panic attack I would feel like my body could no longer manage to breathe by itself, so I would take over and physically try to slow my breathing. This didn’t work at all, as my body was still in control – it just didn’t feel like it – so the end result was that I made myself even worse, as I was further restricting my oxygen intake.
The increased breathing can sometimes lead to other problems due to the lack of oxygen that is going to the head during the fight or flight response. These problems or side effects can include dizziness, blurred vision, hot flashes, confusion and a sense of altered reality.
To discover how you can conquer panic attacks visit Wendys site at Anxiety Attacks and claim your free report 7 Steps To 7 Steps To Conquering Your Anxiety.
