Imagine you’re walking down a dark alleyway and a suspicious character appears behind you with a knife in hand! Sight of this puts you in an immediate state of anxiousness - your heart is pounding frantically in your chest, your breathing becomes fast and shallow, your body is trembling and your legs feel like jelly, your throat becomes dry, and you feel dizzy and nauseous. You turn around again and now they are running towards you. You panic and are now physically ready to protect yourself from the perceived attacker or run as fast as your legs will carry you. This is known as the "fight or flight response,'' a natural human survival mechanism used to protect us from danger.Sometimes we have thoughts and fears triggered by a whole range of negative and stressful life experiences which can subconsciously activate the fight or flight response even in the absence of danger. Our mind communicates to our body that it needs to protect us from perceived danger. When this occurs in the absence of any real danger, the body physically reacts in a way that the conscious mind cannot understand as we begin to physically prepare to protect ourselves from a danger we cannot see. This is when we experience all the unpleasant symptoms of an anxiety attack such as palpitations, trembling, shallow breathing and dizziness, alongside a whole range of other physical symptoms, but can’t quite understand why this is happening. These symptoms are simply our body physically preparing to run or fight off an attack. The first time a person ever experiences an anxiety attack is usually reported to be an extremely terrifying experience mainly because they didn’t know what was happening to them.
