Panic atatcks and anxiety are can be very unpleasant and certainly unwanted responses to the events in your life. Anxious feelings are result of our unconscious mind trying to keep us safe by generating feelings that take us forward or backwards away from percieved danger.
These anxieties are fuelled by worry and constant internal dialogue as you think through all the “what if” scenarios should that perceived threat happen. For example; how you might feel when you make that speech – what will happen at the interview – will he be OK on his first day at school etc.
Anxious individuals know that it doesn’t make sense but the fear of the fear can be quite overwhelming. During an intense anxiety attack our unconscious mind just seems to take over our thoughts and no amount of logical conversation calms you down. This unconscious response during times of stress is very natural and is mostly down to our unconscious nervous system and old animal like responses that try to move us away from danger and towards safety. However, what our unconscious mind call safe and what our conscious ego mind thinks is safe, are usually quite different.
Our unconscious mind just want to keep us alive so it jumps in and takes over whenever it senses danger or any perceived threat. That’s why we often jump when something moves in our peripheral vision, to keep us safe just in case. We could never have responded that quickly if we had to think about everything logically.
Anxiety sufferers often have a voice in their mind that goes around and around looking for answers and getting more and more frustrated and angry with themselves for feeling so helpless and a victim of these physical symptoms. They make fearful images in their minds of all the things that could go wrong and this makes them even more anxious. It is well known and well documented that your body responds to what you hold in your mind, for example; you may feel anxious walking through a subway at night and you get the uncomfortable anxiety sensations like a dry mouth, a racing heart and sensitive hearing, yet, you can get the same physical feelings when awaking from a nightmare of walking through a subway!! Your unconscious can’t tell the difference between the real event, a thought or a dream. If you think good thoughts, you get good feelings, if you think bad thoughts, you get bad feelings – try it.
There is another aspect of feeling anxious that is very important, metaphorically speaking, when we consider the things that we need to do that make us anxious, our mind goes and looks into the old database of our experiences to compare and see if the perceived outcomes are likely based on experiences from the past. What you need to know is that often our memories are erroneous, they may feel true but that doesn’t make them true, we might not have had all the information, maybe we were too young to understand the context or perhaps our beliefs have altered the message, for example if you think you are unlovable then you are likely to believe that nobody could love you etc. So, often, people who suffer from anxiety disorders or panic attacks have ‘out of date’ entries in their database and that fuels an anxiety that often makes no logical sense.
Anxiety builds up slowly over time, until, one day it spills over and manifests itself in uncomfortable episodes. Often there are underlying drivers in peoples life for this – stress, upheaval, change, bereavement, pressure, depression, feeling lost or alone – then, when they throw in some disrupted sleep they have the right circumstances for anxiety to thrive. And that’s just the beginning!
Where individuals usually go wrong with overcoming anxiety is that they try to solve their problem using their conscious logical mind, when in fact, the problems resides within their unconscious mind where language is hardly used at all, just emotions and feelings. So, even though they may talk and talk to themselves and get really frustrated with themselves their frustrations are falling on deaf ears. This becomes fearful because they think that they can’t help themselves so they begin to avoid the situations that cause them to feel anxious.
After a while, if the individual does not get anxiety specialist help, then associations begin to form as the anxiety increases. One example of this might be the person who feels anxious in a busy pub, this then extends to a busy train platform, then to a busy train, until the person becomes paralysed by their anxiety and this often leads to depression.
If you are looking for a Anxiety Specialist , then visit my site for advice and Anxiety Treatment Tools.