For a huge number of men and women around the world, living in dread of when their next panic attack might appear is much worse than experiencing the attacks themselves. We feel apprehensive about our normal daily happenings, worried that we could lose control of ourselves and the situation at any time. Simple everyday things like driving a car or going to the shops become big issues and sometimes it seems less trouble to avoid them entirely.We are, of course, our own worst enemy. We know this. We start feeling anxious, so we think that we're going to have an attack, so we feel more anxious and often end up creating the panic attack that we were fearing. Human beings don't like being out of control. It feels unsafe. Recognizing what we're facing makes us feel more secure, and being familiar with the nature of our anxiety will make us feel secure too. The panic attack response is designed to save your life. Mankind has 75 million years of evolution behind us that has prepared us for survival. Cars and shopping centers have barely been around any time at all compared to that, so we haven't had time to adjust to the much safer place in which we live. We all have triggers locked deep within our unconscious minds that can make us panic, with the sole purpose of getting us away from life-threatening situations. We don't have time to think about it, waiting to mull it over in your head just means more time being near the danger, so our unconscious brain takes over. It floods the body with hormones that ready it for 'fight or flight', increasing the heart rate and oxygen intake, heightening senses and readying muscles for action. The trouble is that these effects can increase the amount of stress that you are feeling. When your heart starts beating fast, it can feel like you're having a heart attack; when your body is craving more oxygen, it can feel like you can't breathe; breathing more quickly can lead to hyperventilation and giddiness. Determining the cause and purpose of our panic attacks can help us to dismiss some common myths about them, which will leave us feeling less anxious:You Are Not Having a Heart Attack - though it may feel odd, your heart is designed to react in this way during a panic attack. It is getting you ready to run away from danger or to fight to get out of trouble. Unless you have a heart condition already, there is almost no risk to your heart.You Are Not Choking - your feeling of not being able to breathe is because your body is asking for more oxygen in case you need to run for your life. You are actually less likely to suffocate during a panic attack because your breathing is working harder than normal.You Are Very Unlikely to Faint - it wouldn't be much of an evolutionary safeguard if it made you fall to the floor at the first sight of danger. You feel dizzy because you are hyperventilating, taking in much more oxygen than usual.You Are Not Out of Control - though it feels like you don't have any control over your body, your brain is still completely in charge. The automatic part of your brain has just taken over in order to get you away from the danger.You Will Not Collapse, However Weak You Feel - the weakness in your arms and legs, along with shaking, is actually just the muscles getting ready to do great things to get you out of danger. You are, in fact, stronger and faster under these circumstances than at any other time.All sufferers know the intensely unpleasant feeling of having a anxiety reaction, but controlling our own fear of them is half of the battle to stopping them altogether.
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Our own fear of panic attacks can cause us to have more frequent, more intense episodes, and much of this fear is based on things that just aren't true. How can we overcome this?
From stopping-panicattacks.blogspot.com
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