Panic Attacks. Causes. Tips. Treatment

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Panic attack

A panic attack is a sudden attack of fear and anxiety. The level of fear is not proportional to the events or circumstances that trigger the attack. Everyone can have one panic attack, but frequent and prolonged episodes can be a sign of panic or anxiety disorder.

Symptoms:

Body: A panic attack may be accompanied by - rapid breathing, heavy sweating, trembling, nausea, dizziness, numbness or tingling, chills or a feeling of heat and heart palpitations, and other symptoms.

Thoughts: people think that something terrible will happen, for example - I will have a heart attack, I will lose consciousness, I will suffocate, I will go mad, I will seem like a fool, and so on.

Although your feelings will be real, your thoughts will seem reasonable, but you need to understand that these fears will not come true, and the feelings are not proportional to the stimuli. Many people have experienced this, dozens, and even hundreds of times, but they continue to live. Remember that nothing terrible has happened and the panic will pass, even if you do nothing. Do not run away, being in the same place you will see how the panic subsides.

In addition to strong fear, feelings of isolation from oneself, loss of control, imminent danger, a strong desire to escape or avoid a situation may arise, very often people experience fear of death.

Symptoms of panic attacks often mimic those of a heart attack or breathing problems.

Causes of Panic Attacks

Sigmund Freud considered panic attacks to be an actual neurosis, that is, not associated with any childhood conflict. Today psychoanalysts, speaking about panic attacks, notice that in panic attacks, fear persists unconsciously and can be caused by a conditioned stimulus associated with a previous dangerous situation. In a panic attack, the traumatic event is created by the imagination and this structure is often built around loneliness and anxiety, and this trauma has the same power as the real one.

As a rule, panic attacks occur during periods of life crises and are associated with various, each time individual, unconscious reasons. For example, fantasies of revenge, the inability to express anger, fantasies about significant others as controlling and criticizing.

What can be done?

The best thing to do is see a psychologist. But before that, you can use several tactics:

1. Relaxation;
2. Master breathing control;
3. Limit caffeine intake;
4. Daily exercise can be helpful;
5. You may benefit from vitamin B6 and iron;
6. The AntiPanic application will be a good assistant in curbing a panic attack.

Treatment

There are three main paradigms for dealing with panic attacks - medication, cognitive-behavioral, and psychoanalytic. Psychopharmacological treatment is aimed at reducing neurovegetative responses, cognitive-behavioral methods try to correct the associative and perceptual processes of fear signals, and psychoanalytic therapy works with the underlying causes of anxiety that causes panic attacks. A 2007 study at Cornell University found psychoanalytic therapy to be highly effective in treating panic attacks.

The article used materials:

1. David Westbrook, Khadija Rouf. Understating panic.
2. Ilene Strauss Cohen. 10 Simple Tactics to Manage Anxiety and Panic Attacks.
3. Fredric N. Busch. Calming the Storm: Psychodynamic Treatment of Panic Disorder.