How does an anxiety attack or panic attack affect health?
It is important to understand that an anxiety attack or a panic attack cannot cause mortal harm to a healthy person, they do not pose an immediate danger to him.
How dangerous is anxiety and panic?
However, this does not mean that such attacks should be ignored. Those who experience this should evaluate and control their level of anxiety. There are many reasons for this.
I will talk about three important reasons.
Reasons to control alarms
✓ Anxiety signals the presence of a high level of cortisol or an increase in this level, which causes stress in all organs. For example, many people have experienced a situation where, due to anxiety, visual acuity decreases, or a headache begins, or hands go numb, or sleep is disturbed. As another example, if a person already has a heart problem—unfortunately, many people have it, both men and women—anxiety can definitely exacerbate an existing problem.
Thus, due to anxiety, the adrenal cortex produces a large amount of cortisol, it is called the stress hormone: on the one hand, it helps to overcome stress and anxiety, and on the other hand, its excess leads to inflammatory processes, accelerated cell aging, depression, reduced immunity.
✓ Anxiety is an emotion of the old brain (it includes the spinal cord, cerebellum, thalamus and brain stem). So it turns on before the conscious brain knows what has happened. It’s a very strong, unpleasant emotion that overshadows everything else you know and feel.
When people are unaware of what is happening, they may experience even more fear with each such episode, with another bout of anxiety or panic attack. If a person is left without support, without treatment, without psychological help in such a situation, then his condition worsens, and in some cases, anxiety can lead to the fact that he even decides to commit suicide, for him this will be the only way to get rid of anxiety.
✓There is a danger of misdiagnosing the cause of anxiety, not understanding it and starting to fight it, resorting to such methods as overeating, shopaholism, alcohol and other psychoactive substance abuse; as well as various types of maladaptive behavior.
There are no universal ways to reduce the level of anxiety and get rid of it.
Someone can reduce it by learning to recognize the thoughts that cause tension.
Someone will learn to say “no”, which will reduce the level of their anxiety.
Someone will reconsider their daily routine and devote more time to rest, communication with nature or sports.
And someone will finally sign up to their psychologist.