Have you ever wondered what are panic attacks and why do people have them? Symptoms of a panic attack can be incredibly debilitating and embarrassing, and change the way people live. If they make you avoid grocery store and roads, it makes life hard to navigate. You may have seen someone experience one, or even suffer from it yourself.
A panic attack is basically a sudden and unexpected feeling of terror that’s way out of proportion to the actual situation. About one out of twenty adults will experience a panic attack at some point in their lives, with women being twice as likely to experience them. Here are the common signs and symptoms:
- Common symptoms – Usually people sense a racing heart, sometimes with chest pain. Many people feel as though they are having heart attack and make a trip to the ER (in fact, most chest pain seen in the ER is due to anxiety and not heart attacks). People feel a sense of doom, and they might feel like they’re dying and feel a sense of being out of control. For some people, they might feel faint, woozy, tingly in their hands, and might sense a lump in their throat.
What’s the difference between anxiety and panic attacks?
The major difference between a true panic attack and symptoms of anxiety are that panic attacks are more intense and usually peak around 10 minutes, and last less than an hour. Anxiety, on the other hand, can last many hours, or even years. When you ask someone to describe a panic attack, there’s usually a focus on the panic itself, with a fear of having another panic attack. And whatever fear they can describe will usually sound quite unnecessary. If you ask someone with anxiety to describe what’s going on their head, they can usually describe one or several things clearly on their mind about what’s bothering them.
The unhelpful feedback loop
With panic attacks, usually, it starts with just one small fear (for example-a fear that people at a store will be judging you). When you feel scared, your body reacts as if there’s a physical threat. And when your body reacts, it convinces your mind that there’s actually a major threat out there, which only makes the mind more scared, which only makes your body more triggered. What’s more, you start to notice you get scared of the mall during your drive over. Eventually, you fear that you’re having a heart attack or going to pass out, etc. This is the unhelpful feedback loop where now there is an entire cycle of fear, and the fear encourages more fear. The initial fear of judgment turns into a fear of a crowd, fear of the drive, the road, a friend’s invitation to go out, and the symptoms of a panic attack. This is the idea behind how panic attacks hit so fast and hard.
The important step in addressing panic attack is to focus on the initial fear of judgment, etc. When you can process the underlying issue, there’s no more fuel for the rest of the feedback loop to feed.