Once you know what causes anxiety attacks, you’ll be more able to address the underlying conditions and eliminate them. Anxiety attacks are terrifying, and those who have never suffered an anxiety attack can never really appreciate just how scary?they can be.?You’ll discover the main causes and symptoms?of anxiety attacks?here.

Before we consider what causes anxiety attacks, we’ll look at the symptoms. The symptoms of anxiety attacks are many, but the most common seem to be…

• a fear of something bad going to happen
• hyperventilation
• dizziness
• a feeling of being detached from your surroundings
• tightness across the chest
• tightness in the throat
• racing heart
• irregular heart beat
• heart thumping in the chest
• feeling sick
• sweating
• palpitations
• tingling fingers and toes
• tremors

You may not experience all of them during an anxiety attack, but you will experience several. One of the most common feelings during an attack is the real belief that you’re having a heart attack. I can tell you it’s a really scary experience!

So what causes anxiety attacks and why are they so scary? Anxiety attacks can happen without warning, but they don’t happen without a reason. Something else has been going on in the background and some sort of ‘trigger’ has then sparked-off the attack. That ’something else in the background’ is general anxiety, i.e. higher-than-normal levels of daily anxiety. And the trigger is usually a highly stressful event or situation, which may even have occurred some time before the actual attack.

You see, an anxiety attack — also called a panic attack — isn’t the same as having a normal, short burst of stress / anxiety. For example, the normal reaction to an unexpected event like having to brake suddenly to avoid a child in the road. It normally takes just a short time for a person with normal levels of daily anxiety to recover from that.

No, a person with general anxiety, faced with a similar highly stressful situation, will react much more severely. Their anxiety levels will be pushed, from already higher-than-normal levels, to extremely high levels. Then, far too much adrenalin is produced in the body and the outcome is the symptoms of an anxiety attack.

Since the beginning of mankind, adrenalin is naturally released in our bodies to help us survive dangerous situations, so we can make ‘fight or flight’ decisions fast, and, be physically prepared and capable of carrying them out.

But these are for ‘real’ danger situations. In a general anxiety condition, the person has totally ‘irrational’ fears and feelings of danger. So that when they experience a further sharp increase in anxiety or fear, the body reacts in the only way it knows how. But there is no physical enemy, to fight or run away from. So the victim suffers a whole range of symptoms that don’t make sense to them. They are having an anxiety attack, and not knowing the cause is a really scary — terrifying actually — feeling.

So now that you know what causes anxiety attacks, what do you do about them? If you suffer from anxiety and anxiety attacks, there are two strands to your cure. The first is to get rid of the ‘fear’ of having another attack. This is so important because that fear alone can cause you to have another attack. Then once you have eliminated that fear, you are much better placed to get rid of your general anxiety.