Your heart pounds or races, you sweat, and your head seems full of white noise. These are just a few of the more common symptoms of a panic attack, which can hijack your mind and your body.
Our team at Prime Psychiatry has extensive experience helping patients overcome panic disorders, and the first step in determining whether this might be affecting you is to understand the panic attack. Let’s take a look.
Understanding your fight-or-flight response
When you face a situation that’s potentially dangerous, your body enters a fight-or-flight response and your sympathetic nervous system calls for stress hormones to be released. These hormones, which include adrenaline and cortisol, cause a number of changes in your body, including:
- Increased heart rate
- Rapid breathing
- A change in blood flow to the muscles
- Increased tunnel vision
- Pupil dilation
- Sweating
- Hearing loss
All of these reactions are designed to help you flee a dangerous situation or stand up and fight.
Fight-or-flight versus a panic attack
A panic attack mimics the fight-or-flight response except there’s no clear-and-present danger — these attacks can strike out of nowhere, at any time.
When a panic attack strikes, it can overwhelm you and cause physical symptoms, such as:
- Heart palpitations
- Trouble breathing
- A tightness in your throat
- Sweating
- Trembling
- Dizziness
- Nausea and vomiting
- Tingling or numbness in your extremities
- Chest tightness or pain
As you can see, it’s little wonder that many people who experience a panic attack head straight to the ER since many of the symptoms are also associated with a heart attack.
While these physical symptoms are troublesome enough, the mental side of a panic attack can be equally as disabling. When people have panic attacks, they’re often overwhelmed by fear and anxiety.
People also cite other feelings, such as:
- A loss of control
- A detachment from reality
- An impending sense of doom
- An irrational fear of death
When the mental and physical symptoms come together, a panic attack can effectively paralyze you, rendering you unable to function on even the most basic level. If you’re lucky, the attack lasts only a few minutes, but the fear of another attack lingers.
It’s important to note that, medically, you are not in any danger during a panic attack, even though it feels as if you are.
Treating panic disorders
If you’re having recurring panic attacks like we describe above, you may have a panic disorder. It’s estimated that nearly 5% of adults in the United States will have a panic attack at some point in their lives, and almost 3% dealt with a panic disorder in the last year.
The good news is that we can work with you to get your panic disorder under control. Through medications, psychotherapy, and lifestyle changes, our goal is to help you get back to a world where panic attacks don’t overshadow your life.
If you’d like to learn more about panic disorders and your treatment options, please contact our office in Frisco, Texas, to set up a consultation.