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The short and obvious answer: panic attacks are caused by high anxiety. But, what exactly is anxiety? Understanding how anxiety crops up will help you defeat panic attacks.

One of the biggest myths surrounding anxiety is that it is harmful and can lead to a number of various life-threatening conditions.

So What Is Anxiety

Anxiety is defined as a state of apprehension or fear resulting from the anticipation of a real or imagined threat, event, or situation. It is one of the most common human emotions experienced by people at some point in their lives.

However, most people who have never experienced a panic attack, or extreme anxiety, fail to realize the terrifying nature of the experience. Extreme dizziness, blurred vision, tingling and feelings of breathlessness - and that's just the tip of the iceberg!

If this happens and you do not realize what it is it is only natural to think that you have come down with an illness or that there is something mentally wrong with you. Losing complete control of your faculties is an impending threat and very terrifying.

The Fight or Flight Response: Is it one of the root causes of panic attacks?

I am sure most people have heard of the fight or flight response as an explanation for one of the root causes of panic attacks. Have you made the connection between this response and the unusual sensations you experience during and after a panic attack episode?

Anxiety is a response to a danger or threat. It is so named because all of its effects are aimed toward either fighting or fleeing from the danger. Thus, the sole purpose of anxiety is to protect us from harm. This may seem ironic given that you no doubt feel your anxiety is actually causing you great harm...perhaps the most significant of all the causes of panic attacks.

If we go back several millennia, back to our ancient ancestors, their anxiety basically kept them alive - determining whether they fled or fought when faced with danger. It's an automatic response that took control and tried to keep them safe. It helps us respond to these dangerous situations literally within a split second - virtually instantaneously.

Whenever we find ourselves in a potentially dangerous situation, the brain sends specific triggers to the nervous system. This system is responsible for gearing us up to take action (in this case to either fight or run), and the same system is also responsible for calming us down after the situation has been dealt with. To carry out these two vital functions, our nervous system has two subsections, the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system.

The sympathetic system stimulates our body to release adrenaline, which gives us the ability to take action and to keep taking that action (running away, fighting etc). Once the perceived danger has passed, the parasympathetic system takes over and starts to calm us down again, back into a calm and relaxed state.

Your Body Wants To Remain Calm

When we engage in a coping strategy that we have learned, for example, a relaxation technique, we are in fact willing the parasympathetic nervous system into action. A good thing to remember is that this system will be brought into action at some stage whether we will it or not. The body cannot continue in an ever-increasing spiral of anxiety. It reaches a point where it simply must kick in, relaxing the body. This is one of the many built-in protection systems our bodies have for survival.

The next time you have a panic attack you need to remember that it is not possible physically for the anxiety that you are feeling to cause you any bodily harm. The mind might make the feelings go on longer then what your body wanted them to, but balance will return. The fact of the matter is that our bodies are constantly striving to attain balance or homeostasis.

One amazing feature of the fight or flight response is that it can pull blood from other areas of our body and get it to the areas that urgently need it. The body does this by tightening the blood vessels.

If there is a threat of a physical attack what the body will do is constrict the vessels in the skin, fingers, and toes to decrease blood loss and move the blood to the thighs and biceps, areas that need the blood flow to act.

This exact natural bodily reaction is a lot of people feel tingling and even numbness sensations during a panic attack. The problem is that these symptoms are very easy to interpret as a serious health condition like a heart attack.

Panic Attacks Cause Fear of Suffocation

Probably one of the most frightening feelings that a person experiences during a panic attack is the fear of smothering or suffocating. Tightness in the chest and throat are very common. While most people can understand the fear of loosing control of the ability to breath, speaking from personal experience the anxiety is fueled because what you are really afraid of is your breathing stopping and that you will not be able to recover. The truth is that a panic attack will not stop our breathing.

A panic attack is associated with an increase in the speed and depth of breathing. This has obvious importance for the defense of the body since the tissues need to get more oxygen to prepare for action. The feelings produced by this increase in breathing, however, can include breathlessness, hyperventilation, and sensations of choking or smothering, and even pains or tightness in the chest.

On several occasions, during a panic attack I would feel like my body could no longer manage to breathe by itself, so I would take over and physically try to slow my breathing. This didn't work at all, as my body was still in control - it just didn't feel like it - so the end result was that I made myself even worse, as I was further restricting my oxygen intake.

A side-effect of increased breathing, (especially if no actual activity occurs) is that the blood supply to the head is decreased. While such a decrease is only a small amount and is not at all dangerous, it produces a variety of unpleasant but harmless symptoms that include dizziness, blurred vision, confusion, sense of unreality, and hot flushes.