panic attacks are actually brought on when experiencing high states of anxiety, but that only helps us when we understand why we suffer with anxiety, and how we can defeat it.
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
It’s actually one of the most common emotions we fe el 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.
However, most people who have never experienced a panic attack, or extreme anxiety, fail to realize the terrifying nature of the experience. Extreme dizziness, blurred vision, tingling and feelings of breathlessness – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
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.
The Fight or Flight Response: Is it one of the root causes of panic attacks ?
You’ve no doubt heard of the “fight or flight” response – it’s our inbuilt mechanism that determines whether we stand and fight on run away when confronted with a potentially dangerous situation. This response mechanism is also one of the root cause of panic attacks.
Anxiety is a response to a danger or threat. It is so named because all of its effects are aimed toward either fighting or fleeing from the danger. Thus, the sole purpose of anxiety is to protect us from harm. This may seem ironic given that you no doubt feel your anxiety is actually causing you great harm…perhaps the most significant of all the 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 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 Wants To Remain Calm
When we engage in a coping strategy that we have learned, for example, a relaxation technique, we are in fact willing the parasympathetic nervous system into action. A good thing to remember is that this system will be brought into action at some stage whether we will it or not. The body cannot continue in an ever-increasing spiral of anxiety. It reaches a point where it simply must kick in, relaxing the body. This is one of the many built-in protection systems our bodies have for survival.
So next time you have a panic attack, try to remember that they cannot do you any physical harm. Your mind will undoubtedly make the sensations last much longer than your body would ever have intended, but sooner or later, everything will start to calm down again. I appreciate that’s little comfort when experiencing an attack, having been there myself, but use it to reassure yourself.
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.
This exact natural bodily reaction is a lot of people feel tingling and even numbness sensations during a panic attack. The problem is that these symptoms are very easy to interpret as a serious health condition like a heart attack.
Respiratory Effects
Probably one of the most frightening feelings that a person experiences during a panic attack is the fear of smothering or suffocating. Tightness in the chest and throat are very common. While most people can understand the fear of loosing control of the ability to breath, speaking from personal experience the anxiety is fueled because what you are really afraid of is your breathing stopping and that you will not be able to recover. The truth is that a panic attack will not stop our breathing.
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.
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.
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.
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