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.
There are many myths out there about the way anxiety effects are health. One of those myths is the ever popular “Anxiety can lead to life threatening conditions.”
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 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.
A Root Cause of Panic Attacks – The Fight or Flight Response
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.
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 is responsible for releasing the adrenaline, which functions as the body’s chemical messengers to keep the activity going. After a period of time, the parasympathetic nervous system gets called into action. Its role is to return the body to normal functioning once the perceived danger is gone. The parasympathetic system is the system we all know and love, because it returns us to a calm relaxed state.
Your Body Wants 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.
A fascinating feature of the “fight or flight” mechanism is that blood (which is channeled from areas where it is currently not needed by a tightening of the blood vessels) is brought to areas where it is urgently needed.
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.
When you experience a panic attack, you body naturally increases your speed and depth of breathing – your body is gearing up for a fight or flight response, and needs a lot of oxygen to prepare itself. So effectively, you start to hyperventilate, which can lead to feelings of breathlessness, and sensations of suffocating and choking – and even chest pains.
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.
One of the less obvious side effects of the increased breathing rate, is that blood flow to your brain actually decreases. Although the decrease is slight, and not dangerous, it can make you feel dizzy and lead to blurred vision, hot flushes and disorientation.
For free tips and advice about dealing with anxiety and panic attacks visit Wendys site at Anxiety Attacks and claim your free report 7 Steps To 7 Steps To Conquering Your Anxiety.