Symptoms, causes and treatments of anxiety/panic attacks.
A few years ago I was driving along one of our rural roads when I passed a man walking in the opposite direction. I looked over at him and was suddenly hit by the resemblance he had to my older brother. In less than a minute my heart was pounding, I couldn't get my breath, my face and chest had red welts come up and I began to see black spots before my eyes. At the time I thought I was dying but was instead having an anxiety or panic attack.
It took several more of these episodes for me to finally break down and go to the doctor. The final straw had me shaking for about two hours and my blood pressure had shot through the roof. During my visit I found out I was not the only one, nor was the condition uncommon.
Every year countless numbers of people visit doctors for this same condition. Some have the symptoms I do, some have additional ones like lightheadedness, sweating, nausea and hyperventilation. Often these people think they are dying only to be told by their doctor nothing is wrong with them. They then start to believe if nothing is wrong, they should be able to control the panic attack. "There is nothing wrong, I just have to stay calm." Unfortunately, very often the harder they try to control the attacks, the more often they occur.
Some of the most common symptoms of anxiety or panic are:
1. Chronic tiredness even if you are getting a good night's sleep.
2. Your heart races or has palpitations even though you don't have any type of heart problem.
3. Insomnia-This one I had particularly bad. There were several days I would go for four or five days without any sleep at all.
4. Chronic backache with no history of injury.
5. Digestive problems such as diarrhea or indigestion.
6. Frequent headaches.
7. Hyperventilating because you feel you can't get your breath.
8. Developing fears or phobias that seem unreasonable.
9. The feeling that you are going crazy or are going to die.
Regardless of what you or your family may say, you are not going crazy. Many times the attacks are caused by a chemical imbalance that can make you more susceptible to anxiety. Often the person suffering the attack is under a great deal of stress and isn't handling it well. As the stress builds you may become anxious and as it continues, you may go into a full-blown panic attack.
Anxiety and panic attacks are considered psychiatric conditions but they are also considered to be the easiest of all to treat. Psychological counseling will help you to understand the phobias and will usually help you to identify the triggers. It will also help you to work in a constructive way at controlling your physical symptoms and worries. By doing this you reduce the effect of the triggers and decrease the
A psychiatrist or even a family doctor can prescribe anti-anxiety drugs such as Buspar or Klonopin to also help relieve the symptoms. They offer help but will not really cure the problem. The only real cure is to eliminate or reduce the effects of the triggers.
There are certain medical conditions that can cause the anxiety/panic attack symptoms and your doctor can see if these are a possibility in your case. In mine, I did have a chemical imbalance but there were other emotional problems involved too. I was beginning my road to recovery from my past of rape and child sexual abuse. Since beginning therapy, I have been able to identify many of the triggers and realize why they affected me the way they did. I also began to understand that the attacks were the result of things triggering the "flight or fight" response. In reliving the horrors of the past, I was being bombarded with the feelings, pain and emotional problems, which in turn produced the hormones known as corticosteroids. These same hormones are the ones that would cause the blood vessels to constrict in the peripheral parts of my body and make the blood go into the brain and main muscles to aid in "flight." This in turn causes the heart to pound, breathing to increase, muscles to tighten (including those in the neck and back), and even shut down the digestive system.
Once entered in to therapy, my psychologist taught me how to visualize myself in calming places such as the seashore or in the forest. Another exercise involved me breathing slowly and imagining the anxiousness being blown into balloons that would then float away as they became full. For those that haven't experienced anxiety or panic attacks these things may sound silly. For those that do have them, it worked for me.
My therapist also had me work on self-esteem. She had me do daily affirmations to drill it into my head that what I was feeling was absolutely normal. That I wasn't insane or going that way and that there was no shame in getting help for my problems.
She also had me begin exercising and practicing my karate again. By increasing my exercise level, the frequency of the attacks reduced.
These are just a few of the possibilities in dealing with anxiety/panic attacks. Bookstores are filled with self-help books and your doctor/therapist will more than likely have a host of others. There is a bright side to dealing with the anxiety/panic attacks, they are 100% treatable and you don't have to suffer in silence. As one who has experienced the things first hand, I can tell you the effort of dealing with the things far outweighs the feelings that result from not getting help.
