Panic Attack Help: What are Anxiety and Panic Attacks?

Well to see what Anxiety And Panic are let us first look at the BASIC dictionary definitions of these words.

ANXIETY:
PAINFUL OR APPREHENSIVE UNEASINESS OF THE MIND USUALLY OVER PENDING OR ANTICIPATED ILL, FEARFUL CONCERN OR INTEREST,ABNORMAL SENSE OF APPREHENSION AND FEAR MARKED BY TENSION, INCREASED HEART RATE, AND SWEATING. SELF DOUBT LACK OF SECURITY .


PANIC:
A SUDDEN OVERPOWERING FRIGHT, A SUDDEN UNREASONING TERROR OFTEN ACCOMPANIED BY MASS FLIGHT. SYNONYMS ARE: ALARM, DREAD, FRENZY, HYSTERIA, FRIGHT, AND TERROR.


What can we infer from these definitions? We can see that Anxiety is a feeling of fear, worry, or stress over something. While Panic is an intense response to fear, worry, or stress.

Fear is a feeling and can come in many forms. In fact worry and stress are very similar to fear. One can be afraid of getting into a fight or one can worry about getting into a fight. One can be afraid to lose his or her job or one can be stressed about losing their job. Panic is the response to these feelings in most cases. When confronted with a fearful situation the body will prepare itself to either fight or flee. Anxiety, fear, worry, and stress can trigger an adrenaline build up that puts the mind and body in a panic mode. This makes the heart beat faster in order to give the mind and body more energy to handle the situation being faced. This same reaction is found in a Panic Attack resulting in the same symptoms (SEE CHART 1). You may ask though, Why does Panic Attack happen at times of relaxation or at times when there is nothing to be fearful, worried, or stressed about? This has been what is called "Free-Floating" anxiety, because it seems to float around inside of us and can pop up at anytime, manifesting itself as a Panic Attack.

To describe this better, imagine that you're driving your car along a secluded road and your favorite song is playing on the radio. You are in no hurry to get anywhere, this is just a pleasant Sunday evening drive through the country. Suddenly, someone walks out in front of your car. Instantly you slam on the brakes and you swerve to miss them! You now find yourself alongside the road in a cold sweat and your heart is pounding out of control. Fear of hitting the person and of ruining your car triggered your body to produce adrenaline and panic. This in turn allowed you to react quickly so that you could react to miss the person. This also triggered the symptoms of a rapid heart rate, sweating, palpitations, tense muscles, and heavy breathing. Just as in this example, anytime you are in a fearful situation your body can produce adrenaline to allow you to react (fight or flee) quickly. Your body can also do this on a smaller scale during worrisome or stressful situations.

Now imagine that throughout the day that there are many little fears, worries, and stresses that you encounter but you did not necessarily react to these fears, worries and stresses. Inside your body was producing the adrenaline it needed to react to those situations. But because you didn't "Panic" or use the adrenaline during those situations, this adrenaline is floating around in you and is slowly building up in side of you. Imagine that this happened on a daily basis and no adrenaline was ever used up and no conclusion was ever reached for a lot of those fears, worries, and stresses you were faced with. Eventually, the adrenaline would have to manifest itself at some time. This manifestation is in the form of a Panic Attack and it can happen at anytime, even during times of relaxation. Its just like a balloon. You can blow a balloon up and then pinch the end of it with your fingers. You can hold the air in for a long time and keep the balloon inflated but sooner or later you will relax and let go of the balloon. When you do relax and let go, the air rushes out, rapidly deflating the balloon in a mad rush. Similarly, we can control our reactions to our anxieties, but when we try to relax and let go, the adrenaline inside of us rushes out of us in the form of a panic attack. Also sometimes we can over-inflate a balloon and it pops. We too can over-inflate and build up too much adrenaline and we then too can figuratively pop in the form of a panic attack. So you can see from these illustrations that panic attacks are simply a physical response to a build up of adrenaline in our body that was not used to react when we were faced with anxieties throughout our daily life.


Now that we know the answers to our first questions: what are anxiety and panic? and what are panic attacks? we need to know what source(s) of anxiety in our lives are triggering our panic attacks. Identifying these sources is the subject of my next chapter and is crucial in eliminating Panic Attacks