why do we panic?

[sportynic1]

this has been going though my head for like 10 yrs since having panic attacks i just want to know why we panic and it truns into a panic attack. i feel like such a freak.

[looking4answers]

I think a chemical imbalance sometimes causes panic.. Something triggers your adrenaline to flowing which you notice and all of a sudden you are in a panic.. Our bodies are mostly chemical and if they aren't balanced it gets thrown out of sync ..
and I think it causes us to react and that reaction is panic..

Some people are born stressed and they live their whole lives in a panic.. It could be genetic.. or could be learned or could be from chemical imbalance but other that that im really not sure.. maybe its just stress and the way our bodies deal with it..

[ian1]

I subscribe to the theory that your fight or flight response triggers become oversensitive, often due to stress or illness or whatever. Then you have a panic attack because your unconscious mind decides there is a risk, even though your conscious mind does not agree.

This panic attack causes you to fear another panic attack, causing these triggers to always be on alert, so the slightest thing can set you off. We then begin to fear more and more situations and the whole thing becomes one horrendous snowball effect.

The key to improvement is learning to overcome the fear of the panic attack, thereby teaching the mind that there is actually nothing to fear in these situations, until you become able to cope with the situations again.

How many times do we get just the twinge of anxiety, then the fear grips and it builds into panic. If we can learn to dismiss that twinge of anxiety, rather than react to it, then we can become much more able to deal with this.

[sportynic1]

i just wanna get rid of these attacks for good. ive had to cope with them for 10 years and now am at that stage i cant cope with them.i just wanna give up

[ian1]

Don't give up!

I think it is the fact that our natural impulse is to fight the anxiety that allows it to overcome us. I really believe that we need to just accept that we feel anxious, and let it do whatever it is going to do to us. By allowing it in, and inviting it to do it's worst, we reduce the fear and therefore the anxiety. Most times this means you won't panic at all.

Remember, evolution has happened over millions of years, and many of our unconscious responses are tuned to deal with situations of life or death (fight or flight). We are still using responses evolved to cope with a very different way of life to that we have now.

The panic responses we feel are perfectly natural responses, and in some situations panic is warranted and desirable. It enables us to respond to serious situations without having to think consciously about them too hard.

The problem comes when we begin to have those panic responses when there is actually nothing to fear, like an oversensitive smoke alarm. We must therefore face the situations that scare us so we can re-educate the unconscious mind and show it that there is no need to instigate the panic response.

Panic in certain situations is a learned response to a previous event, and it stands to reason that if we can learn to panic, we can learn not to panic. It's not easy, and it can take a lot of practice, but it can be done and improvement can be made.

You can help the process along by reducing levels of stress and increasing general feelings of well being. Make sure to get enough sleep, try to eat right, do some exercise, that kind of thing.

But....don't give up!!

[sportynic1]

not slept in 4 weeks cos of the pills am on and cant eat.all i wanna do is get back to my normal self. all i do is hide away.dont wanna be like this

[NoPoet]

I think in a few years, mental health research will classify a huge spectrum of anxiety, panic and depression. I think there are a million different reasons why we experience them. One trick is to look for what triggers you - what thoughts instantly send you into a panic.

If you have suffered them for 10 years it's possible the original cause has been long since buried, and the attacks you have now come from negative associations and, maybe, habit.