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.
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.
Unless you suffer from panic attacks then it is unlikely that you will understand the horrific nature of what extreme anxiety can do to you. Imagine feeling completely discombobulated from your surroundings, dizzy, blurred vision, tingling all over your body and feeling breathless and this is only the beginning.
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?
The first response most of us experience to an imposing threat or danger is anxiety. The reason for it being called anxiety is because its goal is to make us either stand up and fight the danger or run from it. Thereby the sole purpose of anxiety is really to protect us. The irony here is that for those that have panic attacks feel that the anxiety is actually the threat and this is perhaps is the most significant of causes of panic attacks.
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.
When confronted with danger, the brain sends signals to the nervous system. It is this system that is responsible for gearing the body up for action and also calms the body down and restores equilibrium. To carry out these two vital functions, the autonomic nervous system has two subsections, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous 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.
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.
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.
The Respiratory Effects of Panic Attacks
From my own personal experience, one of the symptoms that frightened me the most was that I was going to suffocate, simply because I just couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. It felt like someone had a strangle hold on my lungs – preventing me from getting deep enough breaths. Fortunately I’m still here to tell the story. And I’m pretty sure no one has ever been reported has having suffocated during an attack. So the good news is that a panic attack won’t make you suffocate – your parasympathetic system will always kick in to calm you down again.
A panic attack is associated with an increase in the speed and depth of breathing. This has obvious importance for the defense of the body since the tissues need to get more oxygen to prepare for action. The feelings produced by this increase in breathing, however, can include breathlessness, hyperventilation, and sensations of choking or smothering, and even pains or tightness in the chest.
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 panic attacks and anxiety visit Wendys site at Anxiety Symptoms and claim your free report Conquer Your Anxiety. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.
