Health Conditions and Treatments

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.

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.”

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.

If this happens and you do not realize what it is it is only natural to think that you have come down with an illness or that there is something mentally wrong with you. Losing complete control of your faculties is an impending threat and very terrifying.

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.

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.

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.

For example, should there be a physical attack, blood drains from the skin, fingers, and toes so that less blood is lost, and is moved to “active areas” such as the thighs and biceps to help the body prepare for action.

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.

Panic Attacks Cause Fear of Suffocation

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.

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.

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.