I’m going to guess that if you have found your way to this page then you probably know what it is like to have a panic attack or suffer with feelings of anxiety.
Panic attacks and anxiety can be hugely debilitating and very frightening, I should know I suffered with them for several years.
So weather your’e reading this because you have just panic attack and you’re not sure what happened to you, or perhaps you have been having panic attacks for years and tried all sort of things to stop them, you might have even been hiding the fact you have panic attacks from your friends and suffering in silence, I’m here to let you know that you’re not alone and it is possible to have a normal life.
Most people have experienced feelings of anxiety and panic sometime in their life and this is a normal. Anxiety and panic are the body’s way of keeping you safe, so it’s normal to experience these feelings when you’re in danger or in a stressful situation.
Panic attacks and anxiety become a problem if they start to happen on a regular basis at any time.
For along time when I started having panic attacks I kept it a secret, feeling like I was the only person who felt this way. Often, I would have several a day, playing golf with my friends, at the cinema, at work it didn’t really seem to matter. However their were days when I could have quite easily crawled under the duvet and not faced this things I love doing to avoid the panic attacks.
This is where panic and feelings of anxiety can become a bigger problem as they develop into some known as Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). GAD is when people start to avoid everyday normal situation that cause panic attacks and feelings of anxiety. For example, if you had a panic attack at a cinema, might start to avoid cinemas. Then it could be you have a panic attack somewhere else there is a lot of people, and you start to avoid large groups of people, and then pretty soon you become fearful of going outside, also known as agoraphobia. Suddenly you’re world starts to get very small.
What are Panic Attacks?
Although Panic Attacks are extremely frightening for a person experiencing one, they are actually an amazing useful . Panic and anxiety are part of our older brain functions, designed to keeps us safe from physical threats and attacks. This is also known as our fight or flight responses.
The fight or flight response is an extremely effective response for dealing with threats, that enables us to either fight or run in dangerous situations. Thousands of years ago this would have been a crucial part of our make up for keeping is alive.
In modern times however threats to us are not so obvious and come in the form of stress, burnout and social pressures to name a few. This one of the reasons why panic attacks can come out of no where. In these situations there is no obvious danger like a wild animal or attack from enemy. Yet when there is a build up of these modern pressures our unconscious mind perceives that we are in danger which triggers attack.
What Happens During a Panic Attack
A Panic Attacks is when our fight and flight responses are triggered when we are not is danger. This sets a off a how chain of responses in our bodies starting with a sequence of chemicals being released in out bloodstream like adrenaline and cortisol. This causes our breathing to increase as blood is pumped away from our digestive system and towards our major muscle groups in readiness for running or fighting.
Our pupils dilate as our focus narrows and our awarenesses increase to increase out reactions. When in this start blood is also pumped into older brain function known as the reptilian complex an away from the modern part of our brain the neo-cortex. This triggers ordinal processing also called back or white thinking needed for making quick and simple decisions like fight or flight.
Panic attacks
Why do I have Panic Attacks?