It goes with out saying that panic attacks are caused by anxiety. The key to controlling your panic attacks is to understand what anxiety is and how it affects you.
One of the biggest myths surrounding anxiety is that it is harmful and can lead to a number of various life-threatening conditions.
So What Is Anxiety
Anxiety is one of the most common emotions that we humans experience, and it is an emotion that everyone at one point or another will experience. Therefore knowing what anxiety is beneficial. Medically defined anxiety is the feeling of apprehension or fear from a real or imagined event, situation or 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 these sensations occur and people do not understand why, they feel they have contracted an illness, or a serious mental condition. The threat of losing complete control seems very real and naturally very terrifying.
The Fight or Flight Response: Is it 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.
However, the anxiety that the fight or flight response created was vital in the daily survival of our ancient ancestors – when faced with some danger, an automatic response would take over that propelled them to take immediate action such as attack or run. Even in today’s hectic world, this is still a necessary mechanism. It comes in useful when you must respond to a real threat within a split second.
Whenever we find ourselves in a potentially dangerous situation, the brain sends specific triggers to the nervous system. This system is responsible for gearing us up to take action (in this case to either fight or run), and the same system is also responsible for calming us down after the situation has been dealt with. To carry out these two vital functions, our nervous system has two subsections, the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system.
The sympathetic system stimulates our body to release adrenaline, which gives us the ability to take action and to keep taking that action (running away, fighting etc). Once the perceived danger has passed, the parasympathetic system takes over and starts to calm us down again, back into a calm and relaxed state.
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.
Remember this next time you have a panic attack – the causes of panic attacks cannot do you any physical harm. Your mind may make the sensations continue longer than the body intended, but eventually everything will return to a state of balance. In fact, balance (homeostasis) is what our body continually strives for.
One amazing feature of the fight or flight response is that it can pull blood from other areas of our body and get it to the areas that urgently need it. The body does this by tightening the blood vessels.
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.
The moving of the blood from the fingers and toes is one of the reason that many people experience feelings of numbness during a panic attack. This can then be misinterpreted as a serious health problem that could lead to a heart attack. Talking to your doctor if you are concerned about this is the best advice so that they can check you out. This will help give you peace of mind.
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.
Having experienced extreme panic attacks myself, I remember that on many occasions, I would have this feeling that I couldn’t trust my body to do the breathing for me, so I would have to manually take over and tell myself when to breathe in and when to breathe out. Of course, this didn’t suit my body’s requirement of oxygen and so the sensations would intensify – along with the anxiety. It was only when I employed the technique I will describe for you later, did I let my body continue doing what it does best – running the whole show.
A side-effect of increased breathing, (especially if no actual activity occurs) is that the blood supply to the head is decreased. While such a decrease is only a small amount and is not at all dangerous, it produces a variety of unpleasant but harmless symptoms that include dizziness, blurred vision, confusion, sense of unreality, and hot flushes.
For free tips and advice about dealing with panic attacks visit Wendys site at Anxiety Attacks and claim your free report Conquer Your Anxiety. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service
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