16 symptoms of a Panic Attack

The symptoms of a Panic Attack often include these 16 physiological (bodily) responses:

1. feeling an overwhelming sense of fear, apprehension and anxiety;
2. rapid heart beat and palpitations (the sensation of an irregular heart beat);
3. feelings of dread and irrational fear of impending death;
4. dizziness;
5. shortness of breath;
6. dry mouth;
7. ringing in your ears;
8. a need to go to the toilet;
9. sweating;
10. chills;
    
11. hot flushes;
12. trembling;
    
13. choking sensation;
    
14. nausea;
15. fainting;
    
16. numbness or pins and needles.

This collection of reactions can occur at any given time and have no obvious trigger. These attacks happen repeatedly in a non-predictable fashion and apparently you can do nothing to calm down or attempt to control them.

The Prehistoric Man
Far from being weak and 'girlie', these reactions are actually our most ancient and basic. They probably developed as a method to preserve the species of man when there was real life threatening situations to cope with on a day-to-day basis.

Those with this amazing 'pumped-up' reaction survived and those without, died. Remember, as very ancient man, before we became hunters ourselves, we would have been somones dinner if they got the chance!

As a prey animal, we would need the ability to react quickly and evade our predators, just like the antelope does today when it is chased down by a lion.

Using modern scanning equipment, scientists have been able to monitor the activity levels of our brains as a panic attack occurs and it appears that all the activity occurs in the centre of the brain where our ancient responses lie, many forgotten.

Most of our reasoning and understanding goes on in the frontal cortex and as Panic Attacks have no apparent trigger nor any logical rhyme nor reason, it appears that somewhere a signal in the brain takes a wrong turning and fires up the old ancient response of RUN AWAY!!!! or in this case

PANIC!!!