Anxiety and panic feelings result from the ancient ‘flight or fight’ centers within our brains, where feelings of anxiety and fear are generated to make your system react to something – a threat or perhaps a dangerous event. The response that our body has to this scenario is to pump additional adrenalin into the system to prepare your system for fleeing or fighting. This may have been a suitable response in the days of caveman Ogg, but too many of us nowadays sit with a surplus of anxiety and fear in conditions that aren’t really life-threatening. In cases like this, the overabundance of fear and panic can be termed a panic attack.
The precise causes of panic attacks are still not really fully comprehended by science but there are indications that it is a mixture of factors of which the actual physical body such as genetics and brain chemistry might play a large role.
Listed here are physical signs of panic attacks:
Increase in pulse rate and heart palpitations. Obviously for males this is particularly distressing since the immediate reaction is that this may potentially be a cardiac arrest. The original reason behind having an increase in heart rate is that the heart is then working harder to pump more blood into the system to enable you to respond swiftly to an urgent situation situation. The chest area also tightens will probably have a sense of not being able to breathe properly.
This, in turn, might cause you to try and breathe faster and you will then force more oxygen into your arms and legs. The muscles will then tense up – also to enable you to respond faster to a threat.
Your arms and legs might now get all the blood and oxygen, but some other parts of the body might now have less! Especially the stomach and brain can get by with less oxygen in danger conditions. This is also why someone having a panic attack might get an unsettled feeling in the abdominal area and might feel dizzy or lightheaded.
Because of the additional blood flow to the muscles, your body temperature rises and in order to control your temperature, you will start to sweat.
You could also experience other symptoms that are due to the increase in adrenalin, blood and oxygen to the various places in the body that are designed to get you ready to face the supposed threat – either by fighting or running away.
Unfortunately in today’s life, all that happens is that you simply make a fool of yourself by turning up at the emergency section of your local hospital convinced that you are dying of a heart attack!
The thing is that in a lot of cases the body responses are programmed, quite simply, there is nothing that that can be done about this and you cannot switch it off by just willing it. You should get medical assistance since unfortunately these symptoms also do overlap with other, more serious medical conditions and the issue is that you have to rule out any potential serious illnesses or diseases. Only then will you be in a position to think about panic attack treatment as such.