Anxiety and panic attacks! As soon as anxiety is breathing down your neck, a vicious cycle begins to spin. Learn more about it here!
Anxiety – a vicious cycle. Once it’s got a hold of us, the cycle often begins to spin relentlessly – from a fear-inducing stimulus, which we perceive and interpret as threatening, to highly stressful physical and psychological symptoms. On the behavioural level, there are three classic reactions to fear, originally derived from evolutionary biology: fight, flight or freeze.
A concrete example to illustrate this: let’s assume you are afraid of spiders. The fear-inducing stimulus therefore includes all kinds of spiders and possibly also going to places where you’d suspect spiders to be, such as the great outdoors or basements. In order to perceive a stimulus as threatening, you must first perceive it; this happens via your sensory organs, in our example mainly the sense of sight. This perception, which is basically still completely neutral, then leads to your subjective interpretation – and this is where you’re starting to feel stress for the first time, because you’re interpreting the stimulus “spider” as threatening and fear-inducing.
This interpretation now stimulates the areas of your brain which control fear, i.e. the amygdala and limbic system, to experience the basic emotion of “anxiety”. This causes you to notice physical changes such as sweating and nervousness; these changes eventually escalate into physical symptoms such as trembling, palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, gastrointestinal problems and even feelings of fainting, fear of dying or going crazy.
In terms of evolutionary biology, your subsequent behavioral pattern will now be either fight, flight or freeze. The fight can manifest itself through panicked flailing, screaming, attempts to harm the spider, etc. Flight is manifested by reflexively leaving the situation and avoiding potentially dangerous situations in the future. Freezing is manifested by a temporary complete inability to act, in which your thoughts and options for action feel “frozen” – you can neither fight nor get to safety.
Anxiety and panic attacks! Would you like to find out what exactly triggers your anxiety, how to break through the individual stages of the anxiety cycle and explore which kind of evolutionary response is typical for you, so you can learn to deal with future anxiety situations in a better way?
Let’s talk about it in a free initial session!
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