Panic attacks vs. Anxiety attacks. What’s the difference?
Here, we will discuss how to deal with Panic and Anxiety in this article. But okay, let’s say you read this and still feel as if you don’t know what exactly the feeling you are experiencing is. Still, we also don’t want to wait any more than the second line to talk about something that they have in common: seeking help is the best way to start combating both of them.
It may seem hard if you are going through one right now, but you have to let go of your fears to become stronger for when the next assault comes. It is normal to feel hopeless during one of these episodes or even after they end, but one must remember that thinking in this way just lets the disorder win over your mind, and that’s the one thing we must not allow.
Mental health is one of the most important things to do a good job at every conceivable level of life, be it work-related, in a relationship, maintaining productive friendships, you name it; so you can’t pretend like you have anything under control when the one thing that you need is to seek help for yourself. It may not be obvious for you, but everyone else will sooner or later realize that you are not giving your full capacity because something is holding you back. Don’t caress the thing that is nailing you to your current position.
We are going to go through every one of the characteristics of each kind of assault and then give you some advice as to what is the best way forward in case you do decide to seek help (as you should).
So, what does science says?
Panic attacks
Well, if you go by the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a panic assault is defined as a sudden occurrence of a strong feeling of fear and dread that activates the body’s fight or flight responses and puts the mind as if in a situation of danger, when in actuality there is no danger present. They can be divided into two categories.
Expected panic attacks are the ones triggered by a specific phobia that had presented itself before, for example, if one were claustrophobic and became trapped in an elevator without electricity, there is a higher probability that this event will provoke a panic assault, but because we can point out easily what the cause of the problem is, we can say that it was an expected one.
Unexpected panic attacks, on the other hand, are events in which, without any type of warning or way of anticipating it, a panic assault presents itself. This can be caused by a building feeling of pressure and fear that eventually collapses into a more extreme form, be that one of a panic assault.
Some symptoms that may help you identify a panic assault are:
- Chest pain or discomfort
- Chills or hot sensations
- Feeling of choking
- Feeling dizzy, unsteady, lightheaded, or faint
- Fear of dying
- Fear of losing control or going crazy
- Feelings of unreality (derealization) or being detached from oneself (depersonalization)
- Nausea or abdominal distress
- Numbness or tingling sensations (paresthesias)
- Palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate
- Sensations of shortness of breath or smothering
- Sweating
- Trembling or shaking
Most people are going to have a panic assault once or twice during their lifetime, but if you are dealing with regular instances of this, you could have what is known as a panic disorder. These are often associated with uncued panic attacks, as seen in those that happen during sleep. Yes, that can happen.
Anxiety attacks
The DSM-5 does not typify anxiety attacks in its pages, but it does recognize anxiety disorder, and it defines it as an irrational fear of the future or the unknown. This can adopt many forms, like fear of leaving loved ones, one’s home or work; persistent fear of loved ones or oneself being harmed by accidents or illness; fear of forced separation from important affective figures; excessive fear of leaving one’s comfort zone, be that one’s relationship or one’s home, etcetera.
Anxiety disorder is something that permeates many other mental disorders. If you are currently grappling with the possibility of experiencing panic attacks, you are likely to also suffer from an anxiety disorder. Anxiety can also be associated with other disorders like depression, bipolar personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, or gender dysphoria.
Anxiety attacks are what follows, an event that causes stress ends up building up that feeling to a point where it comes out in a rush that may present itself in the form of any one of these following symptoms:
- A surge of overwhelming panic
- A feeling of losing control or going crazy
- Heart palpitations or chest pain
- Feeling like you’re going to pass out
- Trouble breathing or choking sensation
- Hyperventilation
- Hot flashes or chills
- Trembling or shaking
- Nausea or stomach cramps
- Feeling detached or unreal
If you feel as if you have read some of these before, we extend our sincere thanks to you, as it proves that you have been paying attention. There are a lot of factors that create similarities between the two, but if you were paying close attention, you may have realized that the symptom section was a bit more charged the last time you saw it. Let’s compare.
Although it may seem like there is no significant difference, you should pay attention to those red spots and the next part of the article, because it will help you distinguish between these both dangerous and highly invasive mental disorders.
First, we should look at the severity. It is a medical consensus that panic attacks have stronger physical symptoms than anxiety attacks, this means that you are going to feel a lot worse feeling one than feeling the other.
A highly dreadful but useful piece of information is that you can experience both at the same time.
Now we are going to look at the causes of both panic attacks and anxiety attacks.
Causes and how to deal with panic and anxiety
- Work-related stress: we can look at Japan, where their work culture is proven to be incredibly efficient, but they have the highest death rate in the developed world. A study made during the pandemic showed that the mere fact that people were expending more time at home contributed to the decrease in suicidality. Trying to lease yourself from work a little in the more stressful moments of your life might be a good idea if you don’t want your symptoms to get any worse.
- Driving: for many, the act of putting oneself in control of a moving vehicle can be a great source of stress. The danger your possible failure at this activity implies both to you and others can make people feel like there is nothing they can do to drive safely enough to minimize the danger completely. One way to help people suffering from driving anxiety is to drive for them when you can, although the simple fact of being in a moving car may trigger their stress, not being put in charge of the operation may help. Also, supporting them when being the copilot can greatly improve how they feel while driving.
- Social situations: many people suffer from a thing called social anxiety. This is defined as a fear of failure in front of other people in an attempt to interact with them. It can greatly cripple one’s standing in society in any kind of situation, and stress derived from social anxiety can easily culminate in a panic assault. These people tend to seclude themselves from situations like parties or social gatherings (and that happens even when there isn’t quarantine) and instead isolate themselves or keep a small group of close friendships. A way to help with social anxiety is to treat the person calmly and not overwhelm them with social stimuli, as this is most likely the source of the disorder they are experiencing. Being a good friend can help a lot when you are one of the only ones your friend trusts.
- Phobias: we often classify particular fears as rare when in fact there is only a small percentage of people that can safely and correctly say that they don’t have some kind of fear. Fear of dogs is prevalent among children, for example, and in some cases, this condition accompanies the person well into adulthood. Fear of heights can also affect some people to great extents, and in an industrial world with buildings everywhere, one can only imagine the amount of stress they daily go through. Imagine being thalassophobic and having a day on the beach. Phobias can easily disrupt our daily routine with a small trigger, and keeping them unchecked or even unidentified is something that creates a lot more problems for the person suffering from them.
- Reminders or memories of traumatic experience: this is often known as “flashbacks.” It is when we have a sudden throwback to a traumatic event deep in our past that we may prefer not to think about. This can go from domestic abuse to sexual abuse to a car crash you were in when you were little. Trauma means everything that leaves an emotional scar on you, and being confronted with something that brings back that trauma means to open the wound again. Everyone has some trauma, oftentimes people suffering from senility remember the things they are afraid of long after forgetting the names of their loved ones. There is a separate condition called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that helps us identify continual suffering from flashbacks that return us to traumatic moments in our pasts. It is often associated with anxiety and panic disorder and is more often found in women than in men. Seeking treatment and talking to close friends about what is caused the trauma is a great way of starting the slow and life-long process of recovery necessary for dealing with this disorder.
- Chronic Illnesses: this can go from asthma to heart disease. The fear of suddenly having an episode of physical dysfunction can severely haunt the thoughts of those most likely to suffer from it. Ironically, stress is also one of the causes of some of these illnesses, so it is a cycle of fear that perpetuates itself and can take over control of someone’s life. Get regular medical checks and keep up with your medication so that you don’t have anything rational to worry about regarding your health.
- Chronic pain: this one is pretty self-explanatory. People who suffer from regular physical pain live in constant fear of it and continual distress caused by that same pain. This is often a cause for anxiety or order mental disorders, and dealing with it often involves medication and professional treatment.
- Withdrawal from alcohol or other drugs: often the fact that makes leaving an addiction hard is not how good the substance makes you feel— as that aspect takes little to go away—, but the all too often prevalent the fact that one needs to keep taking those substances to not go into withdrawal. This is something that all addicts deal with at some given point in time and is not an easy obstacle to surpass. Often, people go through multiple cycles of excessive use and withdrawal because of the extreme pain it causes to not feed the addiction past a certain point of the cleaning up part. Drug addiction can lead to many paths, but the hardest one is recovery. Support your friends if they are going through an addiction phase because it is often ugly and problematic for the people around them, which builds up stress in their minds and makes them fall deeper into addiction.
- Caffeine: it is understandably hard to blame such a mundane substance for a panic or anxiety assault, but in fact, caffeine is still a substance that creates chemical changes in people’s bodies and thus creates doors to excess. Most Americans start their day with a cup of coffee, and some of them plainly can’t start it without it. This is something so prevalent in our modern society that we have normalized it beyond healthy medical scrutiny. We must remember that any substance strange to the body that affects it must be safely regulated and not excessively consumed.
- Medication and supplements: we often have a problem when adjusting to a new treatment, and is not uncommon to feel stressed about it. You need to talk to your doctor to sort out any complications that may be arising as a direct result of the medications they prescribed and is therefore important to be open about any kind of worries and factors that may play a role in your relationship with the new medicine.
Other general advice
When having a hard time no one likes to hear the all too common “you need to relax” because you know you need to relax, and not being able to do so is part of what is bothering you. But because no one else knows exactly how you feel, you need to take control of your emotions as much as possible to seclude them from taking control over you. This can be done through many means, here are some of them:
Meditation: often championed by its proponents as the solution to all mental problems, you can do it in any position you feel comfortable and at any time you feel is appropriate. You just need to get a hold of your breathing and direct it to your will. You need to feel every part of your body and how the blood circulating through it gives you control over its movements. This can go a long way to calm you when you have anxiety and is a good mechanism to prevent emotions from getting that far in the first place.
Reading: dedicating your time to another person’s perspective can also help you with your stress. In the world of literature, there are no stupid questions, and you can dedicate yourself to look for answers in many worlds, at the same time you engage with other people through their art and self-expression.
Exercise: no matter what path of life you are trying to go through, being physically active can help you get there much faster. Maintaining your body by walking regularly and moving consistently also helps you develop new ways of coping with stress that may not just include mental relief, but the control over the physical symptoms of mental disorders.
Takeaway
There is no shame in seeking help, and whoever makes you feel that is not a good influence on your life. Try to always seek ways to compartmentalize your problems and dealing with them in an organized way, so that they don’t interfere with the things you care about. We tend to lose other people in the process of losing ourselves. Take care of yourself and the rest will come naturally.
Also, READ How long does it take to become a psychiatrist?
