Heart palpitations, feeling like you can't breathe, living with the fear of suddenly encountering a bad event that you cannot prevent, or being afraid to go out, having increased anxiety in a group of people, shaking in your hands, tingling in your legs, fear of death, suddenly feeling cold and suddenly starting to sweat. Beginners apply to clinics when they reach the final level. Before a diagnosis of panic attack is made, they must meet with a heart doctor or a physician, and as a result of their referral to a psychiatrist, they realize that they need psychotherapy support. Apart from these processes, the good news is that panic attacks are a disease that improves with cognitive behavioral therapies and medication support.
Panic attacks take their name from Pan, the god in Greek mythology. Pan, who is fond of pranking and having fun, is described as having goat feet and a human head. While all the creatures in the forest are peaceful and asleep, he suddenly appears, makes noise, scares them, and watches them run away in excitement. Panic attack patients also say that the following symptoms appear suddenly and intensely, just like this Pan appears.
- Palpitations,
- sweating
- tremors
- shortness of breath or feeling of suffocation
- shortness of breath
- chest pain
- nausea or abdominal pain
- feeling of dizziness or fainting
- perception of the environment as unreal or an intense feeling of alienation
- fear of losing control or going crazy
- fear of death
- numbness and tingling
- We can list the complaints as chills or hot flashes.
The most important feature of panic attack disease is that systems such as the limbic system and amygdala, which act as 'insurance' in the human brain during the evolutionary process, give 'wrong' warnings, and the body takes an alarm position against this wrong warning. The most important factor that needs to be determined here is environmental factors. For example, negative and pessimistic interpretations of events within the family and being raised by overly controlling parents are among the childhood experiences that provide the basis for the emergence of panic disorder. This is your adult life When environmental factors that can be a source of stress are added, the mind immediately acts as an insurance device and sends an alarm to the body, and panic attack symptoms appear. It should not be forgotten that having this alarm system in our minds is vitally important. Millions of years ago, it warned us of external threats, kept us awake, and enabled us to react in certain ways. Once we are warned about the threat, we are expected to take a fight or flight stance. Nowadays, people surrender to the symptoms of panic attacks that occur in response to a 'wrong' or 'justified' warning signal. However, it is possible to treat this disease with psychotherapy and medication that increases serotonin levels.
The most difficult aspect of panic attack disease is that the person becomes increasingly lonely and cannot do daily tasks. We can call this situation 'deterioration of functionality'. Until a diagnosis of panic attack is made, patients search for the causes of their symptoms for a long time and often in the wrong places. For example, someone who has had one or more attacks while shopping at the market does not want to go to the market for fear of having another attack. Similarly, it will be very difficult for another person who has had an attack on the subway to get on the subway again. When you generalize this situation, it becomes impossible for most patients to go out for fear of having an attack. The diagnosis of this situation is often called panic attack with agoraphobia. In these examples, the causative situations are often misinterpreted. The causes of the symptoms are elsewhere and the solutions are definitely not those we talked about above.
As I tried to explain, panic attacks are a disease that affects life, can prevent the performance of daily tasks, and can negatively affect our surroundings. In its treatment, psychotherapy should be applied with drugs that increase the level of the hormone called serotonin. As a result of increasing the serotonin level, the person will feel more energetic and happier as anxiety, distress, anxiety and worry decrease. In this case, cognitive behavioral therapies enable the person to recognize automatic thought patterns, reorganize them, replace them with 'healthy' thought patterns, and stimulate the body's response through alarm states. It includes recognizing reactions and giving practical homework to eliminate them. The process generally progresses from the easiest idea to the most difficult idea. One should start from whatever idea is easy for the patient to work on. Regarding going to the grocery store, the patient may say, "I feel like I'm going to die when I go to the grocery store." After learning the patient's feelings and thoughts about the event of 'going to the grocery store', it is questioned whether the panic symptoms are related to whether or not they go to the grocery store, and how many people show these symptoms when they go to the grocery store. At a certain stage, he is asked to go to the grocery store. Then, it continues to work on other thought patterns that it generalizes. Please care about your mental health for the sake of those around you and your own quality of life.
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