Posts tagged Anxiety Panic

While anxiety and panic attacks share some similar characteristics there are some significant differences in the manner they attack and effect their host. Both are serious dilemmas which need to be professionally treated as they can become crippling disorders that have such a negative impact on life that a person can no longer function in a meanigful way if the go unaddressed. What follows is an overview of anxiety attacks and a panic attacks and their differences.

We all to some degree deal with anxiety in our lives, some do so in a manner which allows them to effectively deal with it and others for whatever reason are unable to do so. An anxiety attack is like a piggy bank. For most people little bits an pieces of anxiety build up like pennies. Anxiety can be caused by literally anything, jobs, finances, relationship woes, worrying about a performance, or anything you can think of. Getting back to the piggy bank, we take each penny (Bit of anxiety) and plave it in the piggy bank until some future date. Sometimes the issue resolves itself and the penny disappears from the piggy bank.

There are times when the pennies build up so quickly and no resolution is found that they take up all the space in the piggy bank and when that happens an anxiety attack is on the cusp. There is simoly no more room to store anything. Only two things can happen at that time, the person deals with the issues and empties the bank, or they find it too overwhelming to deal with and that is when the anxiety attack occurs. It is easy to think of in relation to the term “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” It is important to note it isn’t just worrying about finances or a job, etc… that causes anxiety but the way a person deals with those issues that can cause anxiety.

The thing about an anxiety attack is it can be traced back to specific issues that led up to it. There is a chronology and logic to it. It can be identified and dealt with so that in the future such things can be avoided or lessened and the sufferer is equipped to cope with anxiety in a manner that doesn’t allow anxiety attacks to occur, or at the very least be common place.

A panic attack by comparison is less clear. In some cases a panic attack is misidentified as an anxiety attack. A panic attack is like a bullet, it just arrives without warning and invades the host out of the blue. Panic attacks come with extreme physical symptoms that are so intense a feeling of impending disaster or even death is not uncommon. Rapid shallow breathing, gasping, rapid heart rate, the inability to swallow, numbness, trembling, dizziness, and sudden perspiration are all hallmarks of a panic attack.

An anxiety attack is a buildup that comes on slowly and lingers, sometimes a mild to moderate anxiety attack can stretch out as long as a couple days. A panic attack is quick, it comes on fast and rarely lasts beyond a half hour. A panic attack comes with extremely heightened pysical reactions while an anxiety attacks physical reactions are no less real but not as intense. An anxiety attack can generally be traced back to the manner in which a person has ineffectively dealt with several situations that cause anxiety while a panic attack can be triggered by situations that have never caused a person anxiety before.

The cold hard fact is there is no absolute when dealing with panic and anxiety attacks. Different professionals have a different take on the genesis of these phenomena. The differences between the two can seem very subtle on paper but the actual pysical and emotional manifestation of the two is as different as night and day as any sufferer of the two can readily tell you.