Anxiety attacks or panic attacks are episodes in which the person feels out of control. They are characterized by a high stress response that is accompanied and / or produced by a high degree of fear and anxiety. Although an anxiety attack may seem very serious and unpleasant, it is not. Its duration usually depends on how scared the person is and their reaction to that fear, the more afraid they are, the longer the panic attack will be.
Anxiety attacks can be successfully treated using psychotherapy and medication, if necessary, together. In this Psychology-Online article, we explain the cHow to manage an anxiety or panic attack
Index
- Symptoms of an anxiety attack
- Why do they give anxiety attacks? Most common causes
- How to manage and control an anxiety attack
- Treatment for anxiety attacks
Symptoms of an anxiety attack.
Despite the signs of an anxious crisis may vary by person and situation, some of the most common symptoms during an anxiety attack are the following:
- Feeling of overwhelming fear
- Feeling of going crazy or losing control
- Feeling of being in grave danger
- Need to escape
- Dizziness
- Heart palpitations
- Tremors
- Sweats
- Shortness of breath
- Chest or abdominal pain
- Leg weakness
- Stay pale
- Feeling out of reality
- Sudden changes in temperature
- Feeling that you are going to die
The above symptoms can be accompanied by:
- Depersonalization: feeling separated from reality, from oneself, even from normal emotional ones.
- Derealization: feeling that you are in a dream, that nothing is real.
- Emotional stress
- Inability to calm down
- Feeling of a knot in the stomach
- Sickness
- Feeling of panic
- Need to go to the bathroom
- Feeling like you are short of breath, as if there is something in your throat that is blocking it.
These are just some of the symptoms that can occur in a panic attack. Each body reacts differently and presents its own combination of symptoms, all combinations are possible. In addition, they also depend on the number, frequency, duration time and intensity of the attack.
Why do they give anxiety attacks? Most common causes.
To understand and manage anxiety attacks correctly, it is important to know the reason why our emotional state is suddenly overwhelmed. The most common causes are the following:
High levels of anxiety
The most common cause of an anxiety attack is think you are in danger. Believing that your life is in danger causes the body to produce a very high stress response, producing changes at a physiological, psychological and emotional level. Therefore, the main cause of an anxiety attack is an anxious behavior.
High chronic stress
When stress is kept at reasonable levels, the body functions normally. But when we allow stress to build, the body produces the conditions necessary for an involuntary panic attack. The person may think that they are having a heart attack or that they have some other medical problem, which makes people with characteristics of anxious personalities react with more fear and, therefore, more anxiety, causing the body to produce more changes due to the new response of stress. If fear and anxiety continue or increase, the stress responses emitted by the body will be prolonged.
How to manage and control an anxiety attack.
An anxiety crisis is a frightening and very stressful experience, so it is important to control the attack as well as possible using the following techniques:
- Look out for symptoms: An anxiety attack becomes uncontrollable when symptoms overwhelm us and we cannot handling them, however, is always preceded by milder signals which we can control and manage.
- Control your breathing: When we panic, the part of our nervous system responsible for keeping us on our toes is activated: the limbic system. By controlling the breathing rhythms we will be able to return to a more relaxed physiological state.
- Avoid sneaky thoughts: many of the anxiety attacks are generated by the appearance of negative thoughts and beliefs irrational, calming our mind is a complicated but very effective task if our objective is to control a crisis of anxiety.
- Look for points of support and distractions: it is important to cut off anxious and stressful thoughts, look for an element that distracts us of them or a person who helps us calm down will be a good resource to handle an attack of panic.
Treatment for anxiety attacks.
Apart from knowing how to control a panic attack, we must treat our base anxiety. Suffering an attack is in turn a symptom of a possible anxiety disorder and therefore it is important to treat it to return to a calmer mental state.
Psychological treatment
An important component of treatment for anxiety attacks is psychotherapy. The most suitable therapies are cognitive behavioral and exposure therapy. Both therapies focus on producing changes in behavior rather than looking for the underlying psychological problem, possible conflict, past events, etc.
- Cognitive therapy: the therapist will ask about your thoughts, both previous and present during the attack, and your behavior. Later, it will help you identify the pattern of negative and irrational thoughts that is fueling your anxiety and that, finally, produces an anxiety crisis.
- Exposure therapy: This therapy requires that the person face the stimuli that cause stress (labor conflict, public speaking ...) in a safe environment. For example, let's imagine that a person is afraid to speak in public and this produces anxiety attacks. With this therapy, you will first be asked to speak in a closed room or classroom, with no one to listen. Afterwards, you will be asked to do it in front of trusted people. And when the person already feels ready, they will do so in the normal situation, in front of unknown people.
Pharmacotherapy
Medications used to treat anxiety attacks cannot “cure” the person if they are used as the only treatment option, but they are more effective when used in conjunction with psychotherapy. There are different classes of psychotropic drugs for anxiety attacks, depending on the type of anxiety: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), tricyclics, monoamido oxidase inhibitors (MAOI) and benzodiazepines.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to How to control an anxiety or panic attack, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.
