If you think about it, panic attacks, fear, and anxiety are actually things that are helpful for us humans. Without them, we would never know when to be cautious, or when we’re faced with danger. And without this warning system in place, we would never know when we need to protect ourselves, resulting in us getting in trouble and possibly hurt in the process.
You can see how this would’ve been helpful for our caveman ancestors. Imagine if you will a caveman out in the jungle hunting and gathering for their next meal, and all of a sudden they’re faced with a tiger or a bear. Without this warning system, we’d probably be eaten alive. But because we can detect threat, we’re able to do something to save us, and broadly speaking, we have two ways to respond. We can either run away, or fight/kill the threat. And this is basically your fight or flight response to a threat.
Regardless of whether you run or fight, your body needs to prepare itself. Your heart starts to pump faster to get blood to the vital organs, your heart, lungs and stomach. And as it does this, your fingers and toes get a tingly, cold feeling as blood is drawn away from the ‘less’ vital parts of your body so that the blood can be where it’s most needed. Your muscles start to tense up as it prepares to spring into action when you’re fighting or running, and as this is happening, your body starts sweating as well in anticipation to start cooling you down, making it feel like you’ve got chills. All the while, your mind is going into overdrive, anticipating the impending harm/death, and how you can escape or kill the threat.
Now if any of that sounds familiar, it’s because you just read it above. These are almost exactly the same as the symptoms of a panic attack. A panic attack is basically your body getting ready to run away, or to fight a threat.
But the thing is, we don’t have bears or tigers around us very much anymore. We do see them in the zoos, but they’re not altogether that threatening. What we do have are modern day threats, and these come in the form of angry bosses, disgruntled customers, mean teachers and partners who’re angry that we’ve missed a birthday. And because you can’t technically run away from these threats, or remove them from your life, that means that your ‘threats’ are perpetual, and hence we have what we call a panic attack, where your body perceives a threat, reacts to it, but because it can never go away, it stays in a heightened state for a long time.
If you’d like to find out if you have had panic attacks, give this test a go!
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