By Elaine Ryan
Understand why you experience the symptoms of panic and anxiety.
Anxiety can result in some startling sensations in your body and mind and can result in Panic Attacks.
Whether you experience anxiety symptoms such as chest pain or a racing mind, or a full blown panic attack where it feels like you are dying, all of these symptoms are down to the workings of your nervous system.
There is nothing physically wrong with you, the symptoms of panic and anxiety are harmless if experienced appropriately.
I’m a doctor of psychology and have experienced both anxiety and panic attacks-
my purpose in telling you this, is to normalize your experience, as you may feel alone with what is happening.
Anxiety, in one form or other, will be experienced by most of us at some stage. The problem is we do not speak about it – there is still stigma. I want to break down that stigma.
The symptoms you experience may be caused by having an anxious brain. An anxious brain is expert in giving you anxiety in normal day to day situations. Find out more.
It is your over worked and over sensitized nervous system that is responsible for the symptoms of anxiety that you experience.Find out more.
Breathing
Many people feel that they can’t breathe properly during a panic attack. It may feel like you are gasping for breath or can’t get enough air into your lungs.
You may also feel like you are suffocating or being smothered.
Normally you don’t have to think about breathing, you do it automatically. The autonomic nervous system makes sure of this. The autonomic nervous system is made up of the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system.
During high emotions the sympathetic nervous system produces a “fight or flight” response. It is trying to protect you from danger (although there is no danger there.) It is the sympathetic nervous system that causes your breathing to change. It may speed up and cause rapid shallow breathing.
You hyperventilate. You are still breathing. Your breathing has just changed rapidly and it feels uncomfortable, but you are still breathing.
Having difficulty breathing is one of the most frightening symptoms of panic attacks. The important thing to understand is that this response is due to you getting a fear response in situations where you do not need. Your nervous system has become over sensitized.
Chest Pain and Tightness
This can feel like someone has put a belt around your chest and tightened it. It can also feel like something is pressing down on your chest, or squeezing it . Your heart may be beating out of your chest. Chest pains such as these are usually why people, like yourself, attend their physician, afraid that something has happened to their heart.
If you have been given the all clear, the pain that you are experiencing is down to breathing too fast (hyperventilation). Anxiety causes our heart to beat faster than is needed and we overwork our chest muscles, which leads to the sensations that you experience.
Chest pain may cause you to feel alarmed and fear that you are having a heart attack. This fear often makes you panic more.
As explained previously, you hyperventilate during a panic attack. When you hyperventilate on a regular basis, you are over breathing. You are using the chest muscles more often than normal. If these muscles are over worked too often you will begin to feel chest pain.
If you regularly have chest pain and difficulty breathing (and it is not as a result of a medical condition), you may have an anxious brain – find out more.
Dizziness and Feeling Light Headed
As you breathe in normally, you are breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. When you are breathing too fast or overbreathing during a panic attack, the levels of carbon dioxide in your blood starts to lower (as you are breathing it out too quickly.)
When this happens, your blood vessels will start to constrict which leaves you feeling dizzy.
Numbness and pins and needles
Again, this is due to over breathing.
When your blood vessels tighten, you can start to feel numb and pins and needles, literally anywhere in your body.
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Heart Racing and Palpitations
This is one of the more frightening panic attack symptoms as you may feel that your heart is about to give up.
Your autonomic nervous system controls, amongst others, your breathing and your heart rate. You don’t have to think about it.
During high emotions such as a panic attack, your sympathetic nervous system responds to prepare for fight or flight. It is the sympathetic nervous system that is causing your heart to race.
Although unpleasant, it won’t harm you.
Muscle tightness and pain
Again this is due to breathing faster than is necessary. Carbon dioxide drops which results in tingling and tightness.
Think of it this way. This response is very adaptive when necessary. If you fall and damage your leg, where part of your leg has been cut open, your body will immediately get a stress response and your muscles will immediately tighten.
This is very helpful around the area where your leg is cut, as it applies something like an automatic tension to the area.
Your body is trying to protect you, although getting this symptom when nothing has actually happened to you is understandably worrying.
During a Stress Response the large skeletal muscles contract, in the neck and shoulder muscles, to prepare you for action.
This is what causes your neck, back and muscles to ache. It can also give you a headache.
Fear of dying, losing control
You might have found that your thought processes have changed since experiencing panic attacks. Typically thoughts include:
- I’m going to die
- I’m going crazy
- I’m going to lose control
- Something terrible is happening
- I’m going to have a heart attack
It’s natural to think thoughts such as these in the beginning. The symptoms you experience in your body, come from a primitive part of your brain. It reacts first, and thinks later. If your brain thinks you are in danger, it will not wait for you to think about it and decide what to do. Rather it reacts for you, trying to keep you safe.
Development of an anxious brain.
We get into trouble, when we use our more modern part of the brain, the part that thinks and analyses. When you feel anxiety, when there is no danger present, you start to think about it and try to work out what happened. Nothing happened, it was just the primitive part of your brain reacting as your nervous system is overworked.
If you are not able to dismiss the anxious symptoms or fearful event that caused the symptoms, you might start to replay this over and over in your mind – like a movie, that keeps running in your brain, you keep the emotions associated with the event alive. You start to develop an anxious brain.
Think of it it this way. You have been building up a “pocket of knowledge” in your brain relating to panic and anxiety. Without meaning to do so, each time you experience a sensation in your body, you are teaching your brain to check for possible reasons for the symptoms you are experiencing.
For example, it is difficult to ignore a pounding heart, your brain searches for possible reasons. A pounding heart as a symptom of anxiety is not the first thought that comes to mind. You are more likely to be worrying that something serious is happening to you.
This in turn makes you more anxious, and these thoughts are getting hard wired (so to speak) into your brain to match the type of thoughts listed above, with the symptoms of anxiety that you are experiencing.
Which simply means, each time your heart beats fast, you will worry that something serious is happening to you (as opposed to accepting that it is a symptom of anxiety.)The more you do this, the more likely it is that you will have similar thoughts each time you have a panic attack or experience anxiety.
Even when the symptoms have calmed down, you may have taught your brain to worry about what has just happened by thinking about the last time you had a panic attack and what happened then. Was it the same as this time? Will they ever go away? What if? By now, your brain has become expert at predicting the worst and giving all sort of negative thoughts and fears.
The key is to start to break down the cognitive aspects of anxiety – that simply means the thought processes associated with anxiety. We start to “misinterpret” the sensations we feel in our body, which makes the experience worse. For example, if you are at home watching TV and suddenly realize that your breathing has changed. That it is hard to catch your breath or you are finding it hard to swallow, if you think;
- something terrible is happening
- I can’t breathe
These thoughts start to frighten you and will affect your behavior. You might stand up, try to change your breathing, or go outside in case you need help. This is sending a message to your brain that something really may be wrong. It is your anxious brain.
If you have an anxious brain, frightening and negative thoughts will be part and parcel of your life. It is like taking an unwelcome friend with you everywhere you go.
The good news is, that it is not set in stone, you can re-wire your brain, so to speak, to be calm, and teach it to respond in a more helpful, appropriate way.
Sweating and Blushing
When the heart is pumping blood around your body during the fight or flight response, your body cools itself by sweating. Blood vessels move closer to the surface of the skin and causes the redness you see – blushing.
Once you are aware that you are sweating and/or blushing, especially if it happens in front of others, your thought processes become preoccupied with what you must look like, and whether the other person notices. This in turn may make you feel more anxiety. Our thoughts are connected to what we feel and can produce symptoms in the body.
This is broken down by CBT and Mindfulness.
Insomnia and Sleep Problems
Your mind may be racing at night and you may find it hard to “switch off.” This over activity of your thought processes will keep you alert and make sleep difficult. You may then worry throughout the day that you will not sleep at night.
This worry, is called “anticipatory anxiety.” We make ourselves anxious by worrying about anxiety we might have in the future. In this case, the future is bed time.
If your body is alert at night, once you fall asleep, you may wake up frequently in a startled state, due to adrenal.
Trembling and shaking
When your body is experiencing more anxiety than normal, you are overstimulated.
Your sympathetic nervous system has taken over and speeded everything up to prepare you for danger. This can cause you to tremble.
Choking feeling, difficulty swallowing
One of the first symptom of anxiety is that your mouth suddenly becomes dry. You may find that it is difficult to swallow or feel like there is a lump or something stuck in your throat. This is due to a lack of saliva making swallowing difficult (but not impossible.)
Tiredness and Fatigue
If you are experiencing anxiety, you will be using up energy that would normally be required for you to do something as energetic as running, and you might just be sitting at your desk.
This will cause you to feel tired.
This will be compounded by the fact that your sleep may already be affected and you are not sleeping as well as normal. You might find that during the day you are worried about not getting to sleep at night. By the time you get into bed your mind is racing as you no longer can relax and you lie awake worrying.
If you are experiencing Panic Attacks as well as anxiety you may be experiencing nocturnal anxiety.
Digestive Problems – Irritable Bowel Syndrome
When we experience anxiety, our digestive system slows down, it finds it more difficult to digest food. This happens because, in order to digest food, we need to be relaxed. another name for the relaxation response, is the “rest and digest” nervous system.
If you experience a lot of symptoms, you will mostly feel the stress response.
This can lead to stomach pains and cramps and finding it difficult for your bowels to work as normal. Over time, with chronic anxiety, this may result in Irritable Bowel Syndrome, IBS.
Blurred Vision and Panic Attacks
One of the first things to happen during the stress response is your pupils dilate, this can cause you to experience blurred vision
Urination and Panic Attacks
During the fight or flight response, the muscles of the bladder and opening of the anus relax
Panic Attacks
Panic Attacks can be very frightening. Experiencing the symptoms of panic and anxiety for the first time can lead to a cycle of fear. The symptoms themselves are harmless, but because they can so distressing, they often lead to fear. You might find that you become worried about feeling the symptoms again and “check-in” with your body to seeing how you are doing. You become alert to the small sensations in your own body. This fear and monitoring, increases your levels of anxiety.
Panic Attacks themselves, may be a symptom of Panic Disorder.
Can the symptoms be due to anything else?
It is always important to go to your doctor to rule out other possible reasons for your symptoms.
Panic attack symptoms can mimic
- Asthma
Heart Problems, and - Thyroid Problems.
It is always advisable to link in with Doctors and Psychologists who are expert in the treatment of anxiety as for some people, you may be experiencing adult onset asthma or have thyroid problems and this may be the cause of your problems and not panic attacks.
Are Anxiety Symptoms different in men and women?
Women are more likely than men to experience anxiety disorders. Some studies have found that men and women may experience panic attacks differently.
Women are more likely to experience shortness of breath and the smothering sensation that is a typical symptom of panic. They are also more likely to feel ill.
Men report feeling more pain in their stomach and experienced sweating more than women in some studies.
This is not to say that men do not experience the breathing difficulties and that women to not experience increased perspiration during panic attacks. Both men and women, can, and indeed do, experience both.
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