Anxiety Attacks: A new way of looking at symptoms

By: Dr. Suzanne LaCombe, November 10, 2006.
Updated: July 19, 2007.

P.S. If you just dropped in from cyberspace...you might want to take a look at this article first: Anxiety Attack Symptoms.

Anxiety Attacks

Our nervous system is like the finely tuned engine of a high performance vehicle. An enormous amount of activation can be kept at bay until the pivotal moment of action. It's set on a hair trigger.

This is what it feels like for sufferers of anxiety attacks. An attack comes at them from out of the blue.

It's helpful to understand that the autonomic nervous sytem (ANS) has only so much room to contain activation. This amount is different for each individual. And consequently, everyone has a different threshold at which the ANS records danger and triggers the fight flight response. [BTW, it is very possible to change your threshold. Many therapists using body psychotherapy do just that.]

An anxiety attack can be provoked at a time one least expects it. Imagine the activation in my nervous system is nearing its threshold. I happen to walk into a busy book store. I start to get an anxiety attack. Was it a book title, was it someone in the book store, or did it just happen for no reason?

When our nervous system is "on alert" as it is when we have high acitivation, our external environment is viewed as potentially dangerous by our primitive reptilian brain. People--especially when we don't know them--are easily a potential threat.

But a book title, "Don't Panic, Face Your Fears" that I happened to glance at when I walked through the door, could also be triggering. After all this wasn't my first anxiety attack. It might only take a reminder like this book title to set me off.

And, it might be a combination of all the excitement and stimulation that a busy book store offers--filled with people or not--to max out my nervous system. It depends on how close to my threshold I was before I entered the book store.

Phobic Responses

This is the basis for many of our phobic responses. For instance, you don't need a bad experience with an elevator to develop a phobia to elevators. But if you happen to have high activation as the elevator door closes and the enclosed space raises your activation level, you could easily develop a phobic response. Your left brain "problem-solver" erroneously concludes that it was the elevator that posed the danger. [We draw these erroneous conclusions all the time but that's another topic for later.]

What complicates the identification of anxiety attack symptoms is that health problems--for similar reasons--increase the risk that you will trigger your threshold for danger. A health problem--no matter how small--threatens our survival and the higher our activation to begin with, the more we will feel its impact.

Let's say you've developed a bad cold and in the middle of your recovery you have an anxiety attack. It's not that your virus caused the anxiety attack. It was just the last thing your system could take. It "filled you up". It moved your system past your threshold for danger.

You see, it seems that the autonomic nervous system doesn't differentiate an internal threat (i.e. a health problem) from an external threat. This is what clinical practice is revealing. Neurobiolgically, it's understandable that anything that makes us vulnerable, intensifies our need for survival.

You may have felt you were doing "fine" before that virus kept you home, and without an alternative explanation for your anxiety attack you might naturally assume it came from the virus. However, it was the virus that caused your nervous system to max out the level of activation. It "filled you up" in much the same way as do traumatic events like car accidents, sudden losses, or bad falls.

Our primitive internal wiring (i.e. our reptilian brain) evolved over thousands of years during which time we existed as cave dwellers roaming the countryside and facing countless dangers. This reptilian part of our brain controls much more of our behaviour than we dare to think. If the nervous system "reads" danger through a high level of activation, we are not in the driver's seat.

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In short, we can lower our level of activation. With reduced activation more of our cortical control rests in our hands. You see, it's our cortex (i.e. our cortical control) that calms us down, that tells the primitive brain, "don't worry, I can handle this".

The higher our activation however, the less cortical control we have and the more suseptible we are to the impulsive actions of our primitive brain. In plain English, this means even though I know the elevator isn't dangerous, I can't convince myself otherwise.

My Personal Musings

This is one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of body-based therapies. Much of their success can be attributed to the calming effects on the nervous system that dramatically lowers the risk for anxiety attacks and other anxiety-related problems.

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I hope you enjoyed reading my article on anxiety attack symptoms. To learn more check out my next article on the origins of anxiety attacks:

Causes of anxiety attacks

Chest heaviness and Anxiety

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