What Is An Anxiety Attack?
People who suffer from many anxiety disorders, including social anxiety, commonly experience anxiety attacks, which are also called panic attacks. If a person who has never experienced an anxiety attack before has one, it can be a very frightening experience. Statistics show that one out of every seventy-five people will experience at least one anxiety attack within their lifetime. In any given year, approximately 1/3 of all American adults will have at least one anxiety attack.
It is important to note that an anxiety attack is far more intense than just feeling anxious or stressed. The symptoms of an anxiety attack include a raging heartbeat, difficulty breathing, hyperventilating, paralyzing terror, dizziness, lightheadedness, nausea, trembling, sweating, shaking, choking, chest pains, hot flashes, sudden chills, tingling fingers or toes, fear that you are losing your mind or dying. A person may experience all, or some, of these symptoms during a panic attack. Different people will experience the symptoms to varying degrees.
Anxiety attacks reach their maximum intensity within the first couple of minutes, then slowly diminish over the next several hours. The anxiety attack can even be completely over in as little as thirty minutes. After a person’s first anxiety attack, medical treatment should be sought, to be sure that it was, in fact, an anxiety attack, and not a more serious problem.
Medical researchers have found that there are three different types of anxiety attacks: Spontaneous attacks, specific attacks, and situational predisposed attacks. Spontaneous attacks are associated with panic disorder. These attacks give no warning, and can occur for absolutely no apparent reason. Specific anxiety attacks are triggered by a specific feared situation or place. The anxiety attacks that people with Social Anxiety often experience fall into this category. Situational predisposed attacks are also a sign of panic disorder. Some people may be predisposed to having an anxiety attack in a certain situation or place, even though they have no known fear of the situation or place.
Anxiety attacks are sometimes treated with medication, however, they are best treated with more natural therapy, such as counseling and deep breathing. While anxiety attacks are not fully understood, often, a person is able to get to the true cause of the attacks with counseling. Furthermore, just because a person experiences one anxiety attack, it does not necessarily mean that they will ever experience another one in their lives.
