How to Avoid Panic Attacks 

Understanding the Symptoms

When a person is afflicted with panic disorder symptoms, he is also more likely to experience a certain kind of intense anxiety which is a result of anything worrisome. The feeling may be intense at the beginning, but at the later part of the panic attacks the person may already experience symptoms of the attacks and this can also be very intense. The most dominant of the symptoms of panic attacks is the feeling of an impending heart attack. This experience may also led the person having panic attacks to think that he is going to die anytime soon as a result of the heart attack. Understanding the symptoms is necessary to learn how to avoid panic attacks.  Although panic attack does not lead to death, yet the intensity of the experience may lead the person to believe that death is indeed just a moment away.

Experience also shows that symptoms of panic attacks can actually take place even without a cause or a warning. Panic attack symptoms are normally experienced from within the body and this usually leads into an uncontrollable fear, heart pounding, chest pains, breathing difficulty, stomach issues, dizziness, nausea, lightheadedness, tingling, hot flashes and chills. Aside from experiencing it within the body, panic attacks can also be felt within the person’s mind, like having a dreamlike sensation, the feeling of terror, the need to escape, the fear of losing physical control and even fear of dying.

One of the dominant symptoms of panic disorder is the fear of having panic attacks in the future. In fact, it has been observed that most people who had previous attacks are likely to have panic attacks in the future. The fear of having future attacks may lead some people to avoid places and events where previous attacks have occurred. The reason for this obvious avoidance to places and events is that they have fully developed an acute kind of fear, that is, phobia. It must be noted that mere anxiety is much more different from panic attacks because they occur so unexpectedly. In fact, panic attacks may occur without signs or warning. Moreover panic attacks are themselves symptoms of an anxiety disorder. Unless given proper attention and effective treatment, a panic disorder can have serious consequences on the life of the person. In fact, research reveals that 1.7% or about 3 million of adult Americans have suffered from panic attacks at one point in their lives and the number continue to increase. The common age of panic attack occurs among individuals between 15 years old and 19 years old.

Normally a panic attack can stay up until several minutes and this is can become the most distressing condition of a person undergoing panic attacks. The symptoms of panic attacks are similar to that of heart attack and this leads the person to think that their condition will lead to death because of the wrong notion of association. Panic attacks may happen anytime, even while a person is sound asleep. This incident is called the nocturnal panic attack, but this occurs less frequent than panic attacks during daytime. Moreover, there are about 40%-70% of individuals who suffer nocturnal attacks that also suffer panic attacks during the day. One of the extreme effects of panic attacks is that it leads to a state of sudden anxiety when a person suddenly awakes from a sound asleep. Nocturnal panic attacks lasts for about 10 minutes, but the calming period may usually take longer than expected.

Although panic attacks may lead to different experiences for people suffering from it, the symptoms of a panic attacks are almost the same: the existence of an uncontrollable fear.

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