How to Identify a Panic Attack

Panic attacks are a frightening experience to endure. In the most primitive sense, they are a terrifying downward spiral of anxiety for the person experiencing it. An attack can leave the victim and those around feeling bewildered and unable to help. Identifying the signs of a panic attack is the first step to conquering the issue.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Realize that one of the early sensations in a panic attack is often one of impending doom as though something awful is about to happen. Often, this sense is joined by terrible anxiety without any apparent cause.
2. Understand that these feelings are the result of a flood of adrenaline flowing through your body. Consequently, there is tremendous fear, a sense that you are about to die, but no apparent threat. Your body creates one.
3. Know the symptoms that make you think you're having a heart attack. A person having a panic attack may have all the symptoms of a heart attack—chest pain, shortness of breath, arm pain. The symptoms are very real and are not imagined.
4. Uncover some additional symptoms. Understand that adrenaline itself will make your heart beat faster, make you sweat and make you shaky. With all this going on, you may very well begin shallow, very fast breathing. This creates another condition called hyperventilation, which ties up calcium in your blood stream. This in turn causes nerves to tingle and muscles to cramp, sometimes causing pronounced tingling in the face and forcing hands into tight fists with fingers that can't be straightened.
5. Recognize the panic attack when it occurs. A combination of a sense of impending doom, severe anxiety, a racing heart, shakiness, numbing about the face and muscle cramps as a classic presentation for a panic attack. However, panic attacks can have a variety of other accompanying symptoms including chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, blurred vision and disorientation.
6. Accept that there is no simple test that will confirm panic attacks. If you are having repeated episodes with symptoms similar to those described, panic attacks should be considered.

Tips & Warnings

• Panic attacks can have so many different symptoms, creating dangerous situations where people having panic attacks are evaluated for one disease after another, are told over and over again, "There's nothing wrong." Only after all other possibilities of illness are exhausted do doctors typically diagnose panic attacks.
• Panic attacks need evaluation not only to rule out other causes, but also to initiate treatment for the attacks themselves. Consequently, even if a person recognizes the possibility of panic attacks and thinks they are having them, medical attention should be pursued.