Believe it or not, over 20 million people in the United States alone suffer from anxiety attacks, but many more are living with this problem and don’t even know it. In fact, anxiety attacks are one of the most commonly mis-diagnosed health conditions within healthcare.
what happens to your body during a panic attack? This article will discuss the most common symptoms of panic attacks, how to tell the difference between this problem and other health conditions that mimic it, as well as the most effective therapies for anxiety attacks.
Before we talk about what an anxiety attack feels like, though, we first need to briefly talk about what happens with this problem so the symptoms and treatments make sense.
Within healthcare, an anxiety attack is actually classified as a psychological problem. But this is actually not completely the case, because this problem is actually more of a problem with the nervous system than it is psychological.
Stress is the most common trigger, but anxiety attacks actually occur due to how the person’s nervous system responds to that stress.
Basically, a person who deals with anxiety attacks experiences a much more intense reaction to what would make most of us nervous. In order to understand this, we need to first have an understanding of the parts of the nervous system that are involved when we experience anxiety.
They are called the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS). Instead of making this boring like a text book, let me tell you a story to explain how this works.
Let’s say that a bear walks into the room as you’re reading this article. Your brain will perceive the bear as stress, because it threatens your life (and I don’t know about you, but I’m a little on the chubby side, so I’d make a pretty good meal for that bear).
Your brain is hard-wired to survive, so at this moment, it has to make a decision – do you fight the bear or run from it? Either way, the body needs to be prepared for this additional activity, so your brain will turn on the SNS.
This part of your nervous system prepares your body to either fight or flee – so your blood pressure increases (you need lots of oxygen to the muscles so they can make you run fast or fight), your heart beats faster, you breathe more deeply, and many other things.
Once the bear is no longer a threat, the brain turns on the other part of the nervous system that I mentioned (the Parasympathetic Nervous System), which does the opposite – it calms you down.
When a person suffers with anxiety attacks, this reaction is intensified – so, their may only be 1 bear in the room, but your brain thinks there’s actually 5 bears. This is where the problem occurs.
So, with that said, what happens to your body during a panic attack? Well, the symptoms of panic attacks are different for each person, and they can be experienced to different degrees.
Some people will have very minor anxiety attacks, so may not even realize what is happening. Others have full-blown, very severe attacks that make them feel like they may be dying.
Click here (what happens to your body during a panic attack) to continue reading this article, where you’ll discover the most common symptoms of panic attacks, as well as the most effective treatments available for relief from this health problem.
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
