Uncovering The Causes Panic Attacks
By: Wendy Jones
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.
One of the biggest myths surrounding anxiety is that it is harmful and can lead to a number of various life-threatening conditions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Remember this next time you have a panic attack - the causes of panic attacks cannot do you any physical harm. Your mind may make the sensations continue longer than the body intended, but eventually everything will return to a state of balance. In fact, balance (homeostasis) is what our body continually strives for.
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.
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.
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.
Respiratory Effects
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.
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.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
|
