Panic attacks cannot usually be rationalised because the part of your brain that is making them happen is not the conscious part, but instead the subconscious.
You can be taught that the excessive sweating and chest pain you feel does not mean that you are about to have a heart attack, but just that you are making too much adrenalin right now. You can take medication to calm you down, and you can attend counselling sessions to accept that the sky will not fall in while you drive over a bridge.
These things can help to allay your fears, but while your heart continues to try to leap out of your chest, you still want to run out of the room. Other people have no idea what it feels like to be in your shoes, and so they sometimes lack patience, understanding, or sympathy.
The brain doesn't always differentiate between seeing a real spider run over your hand and a spider run over someone else's hand on television. If you are scared of spiders, you react in the same way. Even if the situation doesn't include a phobia, the brain can be tricked reasonably easily.
"Growing up on a diet of 1960s television I was familiar with "The Munsters". Years later I was walking home at dusk when a person approached who appeared to have a square head and who was walking awkwardly. Now I knew intellectually that Herman Munster, or anything like him, could not be walking down my street, yet my heart began to beat wildly and I cowardly crossed the road. The "monster" turned out to be a neighbour who had been in an accident and was recovering from two broken legs and a damaged neck. (Hence the head brace and stiff gait)." Margaret
Besides the brain being concerned about dangerous situations outside of the body, it can also be concerned about an upset in homeostasis. Inside our body, lots of things, like temperature, concentration of blood gases, and blood sugar, stay pretty much the same, regardless of what we are doing or where we are. This is called maintaining homeostasis, and it allows us to function normally.
If we couldn't keep these things more or less constant then we would die. For instance, if you sat in a very hot sauna for too long, your core temperature would become too high, and so your fight or flight response switches on to let you know when you need to open the door and walk out into the cool.
This means that if you were wearing too many clothes and sat in front of the heater watching the spider on television, then you may be even more prone to a panic attack than if your temperature were normal because your body is already under more of an attack from being too hot. The same idea can be applied to low blood sugar, low carbon dioxide, or low blood pressure.
An obvious symptom of a panic attack is the increase in breathing that normally accompanies it. Ordinarily breathing increases when the metabolism increases and decreases when the metaboliam decreases. But because you need more oxygen to run from wild animals, the breathing automatically increases breathing as part of the fight or flight response to allow you to run or to better defend yourself.
If the danger is the spider on television and your rational brain causes you to remain seated, then the extra breathing watching the spider causes will simply lower carbon dioxide. Apart from this factor being a threat to homeostasis, it also has the effect of lowering oxygen delivery to tissues (Bohr effect), which creates further stress.
To see if it applies to you, click on the link to find out more about the hyperventilation connection .
A common trigger for panic attacks is public performance, delivery of speeches, or making some kind of presentation to groups of people. When your mouth and throat dry up so that speaking is almost impossible, your knees are trembling under your trousers and your heart is pounding, remember that the symptoms are not in your imagination and you are not crazy. While the reason for the symptoms to occur may seem completely irrational, the symptoms themselves are very real, and so is the reason that they are happening.
Your brain will do everything it can to keep you safe, even clutching at straws, and sometimes this over-reactive response to enable you to run away from the perceived threat, even if it is only on television, is making your life hell. Fortunately you don't have to live with panic attacks once you work out what is going on, and can re-train your breathing pattern.
You have already tried rationalising the problem, right? You are consciously aware that watching spiders or delivering a sales presentation, will not cause you any physical or mental harm. Other people do it all the time, and nothing happens to them, so if must be safe.
You work on your homeostasis by are eating small amounts of protein throughout the day to keep your blood sugar stable, you wear sensible clothing, and you exercise to keep your blood pressure stable. Yet, you still have the wildly hammering heart when you stand up to make that presentation? This means that the part of the problem that you need to deal with is the hyperventilation component.
Some doctors believe that panic disorder is more commonly found in ‘A’ type personalities, who are competitive and who aim high. If this is true (it is only a theory), it is likely to be compounded by any of the above triggers.
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