The short and obvious answer: panic attacks are caused by high anxiety. But, what exactly is anxiety? Understanding how anxiety crops up will help you defeat panic attacks.
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 defined as a state of apprehension or fear resulting from the anticipation of a real or imagined threat, event, or situation. It is one of the most common human emotions experienced by people at some point in their lives.
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 these sensations occur and people do not understand why, they feel they have contracted an illness, or a serious mental condition. The threat of losing complete control seems very real and naturally very terrifying.
A Root Cause of Panic Attacks - The Fight or Flight Response
I am sure most people have heard of the fight or flight response as an explanation for one of the root causes of panic attacks. Have you made the connection between this response and the unusual sensations you experience during and after a panic attack episode?
Anxiety, and the ensuing panic attack is a response to a real (or imagined) potentially dangerous situation - its main function is to protect us from danger. Quite ironic perhaps, seeing as the anxiety is actually making us feel very frightened.
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.
The brain will send a signal to the nervous system when danger presents itself. The nervous system then gets the body ready to act as well as helps the body to restore to a homeostatic state. In order to make sure that these necessary functions are carried out our autonomic nervous system is made up of two subsections called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems.
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
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.
One amazing feature of the fight or flight response is that it can pull blood from other areas of our body and get it to the areas that urgently need it. The body does this by tightening the blood vessels.
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 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.
Panic Attacks Cause Fear of Suffocation
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.
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.
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.
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.