Panic Attacks - What Causes Them and How To Deal With Them

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Know that the anxiety that we feel during the fight or flight response was a necessity to the survival of our ancient ancestors- so that when they were faced with a danger their automatic response would kick in and force them into action. This is essential even today, and is very useful to us when we are faced with real threats and have a split second to respond.

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

We can make the parasympathetic nervous system work when we want when we use our coping strategies. The important thing to remember here is that the parasympathetic nervous system will work whether we think about it or not. It is not physically possible for our bodies to function in a spiral of ever increasing anxiety. There is a point when the parasympathetic response has to kick and relax the body. This is our built in "at home" protection.

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.

If there is a threat of a physical attack what the body will do is constrict the vessels in the skin, fingers, and toes to decrease blood loss and move the blood to the thighs and biceps, areas that need the blood flow to act.

This is why many people feel numbness and tingling during a panic attack - often misinterpreted as some serious health risk-such as the precursor to a heart attack. If you are really worried that such is the case with your situation, visit your doctor and have it checked out. At least then you can put your mind at rest.

The Respiratory Effects of Panic Attacks

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.

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.

As that I have experience panic attacks first hand, I can tell you that there were times when I wasn't sure that my body would be able to slow my breathing down and I would concentrate on getting my breathing under control. Telling myself to take breath in and let it out. With my mingling in trying to gain control and disregard what my body needed, it sent my body into overdrive and intensify the feelings I was trying to overcome. It was not until I began using the technique that I will describe to you shortly that I was able to let my body do what it was designed to do.

The increased breathing can sometimes lead to other problems due to the lack of oxygen that is going to the head during the fight or flight response. These problems or side effects can include dizziness, blurred vision, hot flashes, confusion and a sense of altered reality.

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