The nature of anxiety or panic attacks is a common reaction that arise when individuals believe that their physical or psychological well-being is threatened and is a normal stress response.
However, stress and anxiety are treated as unique disorders because of the existence of specific anxiety disorders that are not regarded as part of the normal reaction to stress.
These disorders include phobias and post traumatic stress disorders.
A knowledge of these disorders and their aetiology is important because they are relatively common, and invasive clinical procedures may serve to trigger them.
Anxiety & panic attacks can be linked to many phobias such as arachnophobia (a fear of spiders), result in high levels of anxiety only when the in close proximity to the phobia.
For example, individuals who suffer from agoraphobia (from the Greek word meaning fear of market places) typically become very anxious and panicky when they find themselves in public settings such as supermarkets and buses.
This fear eventually leads affiliated individuals to cocoon themselves in a place of safety scare of felling anxiety or having a panic attack.
Whilst there are a numerous theories that seek to explain how phobias develop the most widely accepted is based upon learning or behavioural theory.
According to this school of thought, a phobia develops when a previously neutral fear is paired closes in time with a traumatic or unusual event that results in some considerable trauma involving anxiety, pain, or nausea At the age of 17 I suffered my first panic attack.
This which was one of the scariest moments of my life, the only thing going through my mind was calling for a ambulance.
After many more incidents, I searched the internet looking for solutions.