Forecasting the Symptoms of Anxiety Attacks

Recognizing the symptoms of anxiety attacks combined with skill acquisition leads to control of what causes panic attacks: misinterpretation of one's internal signals of distress.

Correcting this involves learning skills to interpret the confusing data that is displayed on the screen of your own mind. It requires skills to notice and observe, to know which sensations and thoughts are significant and which are not. It requires learning how to see patterns of emotions, sensations, and images that help you guesstimate the future. Just like weather forecasting, predicting what’s coming with your emotions is an imperfect endeavor. But as imperfect as it is, it is still necessary. Overcoming panic attacks involves raising your emotional intelligence by acquiring the skills to read your internal gauges or the cues displayed in your thoughts. It means learning to discern the meaning of what it happening inside you as it relates to the present moment and knowing what to do next. Does a person have to know a lot of psychology to do this? Not at all. He or she just needs to know enough about each gauge to make wise decisions about what to think about and what to do next.  Specifically, one must understand that what causes panic attacks is a particular interpretation (misterpretation) of physical sensations.

Forecasting the Symptoms of Anxiety Attacks Provides a Sense of Control While Making Decisions During a Panic Attack

 1. It means recognizing subtle physical sensations in your body without inflating them into a catastrophy or instantly concluding that they are equal to the symptoms of anxiety attacks.

2. It involves noticing the feelings of anxiety and making decisions about how to explain to yourself what is going on. 

3. It means looking at the dials and gauges—the mental pictures, the feelings, the thoughts--and making a decisions about what they are telling you about reality. It means assessing for yourself what all this internal “data” means for the decisions at hand. 

4. It has a concept of normal anxiety that can serve as an internal reference point. Normal anxiety isn’t always cool and calm. Realistic anxiety knows when to recognize when the hurricane is, in fact, on its way and then evacuate. Panic sufferers are frequently evacuating at the first site of one small, lonely cloud. The outstanding feature of normal anxiety is its calibration to the real factors of safety and danger in a particular situation. Note that the point here is not to feel good all the time. Rather it is to be more grounded and realistic. Thus, from one point of view, what causes panic attacks is lack of calibration between ones anxiety level and the actual threats posed by the facts of the situation.

5. Finally, discerning decisions are emotionally intelligent and self-aware. Wise decisions about danger involve going beyond interpreting the dials and gauges (e.g., feeling dizzy) to being decisive in a way that neither caters to your anxiety nor ignores it. When your heart is pounding, you can make a reasonably realistic decision about whether to avoid danger or say to yourself, “It’s okay…just chill, just breathe ….yes, it’s really scaring the __________ out of me…steady now…this happened before and you didn’t die.” 

6. It’s also helpful to acknowledge your fears even while you are calming yourself. This usually works better than trying to convince yourself that it’s not a big deal.

One way to distill all these principles is to think of yourself as moving through a process of becoming more honest about yourself, other people, and the exact amount of risk in situations. When your head is swirling with a thousand “What if” questions, you are most likely painting a more catastrophic picture for yourself than is warranted by the facts.  

 What Causes Panic Attacks? Understanding Posttraumatic Stress Reactions

 At what point do painful memories become a full-blown anxiety disorder or depression? The following checklists are from the standard diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals. It's a summary of the criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder of PTSD.

Posttraumatic Stress is the persistent or delayed reaction to a life-threatening event that involves:

(1) reexperiencing the event in distressing ways (nightmares, flashbacks, symptoms of anxiety attacks, depression),

(2) various tricks of the mind to avoid any reminders of the event, and

(3) symptoms that show that the person is much more keyed up than they used to be (sleep problems, irritability, outbursts of anger, exaggerated startle response).

This type of stress becomes a disorder when it negatively impacts one’s life in significant ways. When this happens it is often referred to as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

A trauma is an overwhelming event or situation that forces a person to develop a cluster of symptoms. Traumatic stress is the cluster of distressing symptoms. It is called posttraumatic stress because it often has a delayed onset. Many people who seem to be “doing well” after a natural disaster begin to develop major problems several months later. This is the “post” in posttraumatic.