Posts Tagged ‘over coming panic attacks’

Here are 8 short documentary’s on anxiety,depression, and stress, in video number 8 he talks about Is Anxiety Inherited, do we have an anxiety gene?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Is Anxiety Inherited, he is not saying a definite no to this, but what i feel he is saying is, that the behaviour is learnt.

It has been a known truth for many years that anxious parents can pass anxiety disorders on to their children.  Although this truth is well known, no one is prepared to say yes to this question "is anxiety inherited”.

But now, a modern study by the scientists at Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre, came up with the deduction that a family-based program where parents and children are being treated jointly, can lessen the symptoms and risks of anxiety amongst these children.

Each person can get nervous from time to time, but when the crisis starts taking over one’s life, the state is then called anxiety disorder. It can be exceptionally stressful and prevent people from living their lives fully. Some individuals with anxiety disorder may also have phobias and develop panic attacks.

For the study purposes, the Hopkins investigators looked at 40 children among the ages between 7 and 12 years. The children were not diagnosed with anxiety disorder themselves but all of them had at least one parent who was diagnosed with the condition.  What other proof do we really need to answer the question "is anxiety inherited".

Researchers at random split the participants into two groups, with 20 of the children and their families taking part in an 8-week cognitive behavioural therapy program, while the other 20 were put on a waiting list and did not receive any treatment during the period of the study, but were offered therapy one year later.

The CBT program, which consisted of one-hour-long weekly sessions, was focusing on an improvement of problem-solving skills, schooling about anxiety disorder, as well as helped parents ascertain and change behaviours supposed to contribute to anxiety in the children.

The primary researcher of the study, Dr. Golda Ginsburg, PH.D., a child psychologist at Hopkins Children’s Centre and an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said that according to the records gathered by the experts, the children of parents with an anxiety disorder are up to seven times more likely to develop the disorder themselves, and up to 65 per cent of kids who live with an anxious parent meet the criteria for anxiety disorder.

The results of the experimentation revealed that within a period of 12 months, 30 per cent of the children who did not participate in the program, had developed an anxiety disorder, compared to none of the children who were enrolled in the family based therapy. A 40 per cent decrease in anxiety symptoms in the year after the therapy program were independently reported by parents along with investigators who analyzed the behaviour of the kids and their parents. There was no drop of anxiety symptoms observed among children on the waiting list.

The parental behaviours modified with therapy program included overprotection, excessive criticism and excessive expression of fear and anxiety in front of the kids. The program targeted childhood risk factors such as avoiding anxiety-provoking situations and anxious thoughts.

According to a recent editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, it is prevention and not treatment, of childhood anxiety, that is of a chief importance, because anxiety disorders affect one in every 5 children in the United States, but very often are left unrecognized. If not addressed in time, the problem can lead to depression, substance abuse and poor academic performance throughout childhood years and way into adulthood.

Results of the study will be published in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The study was funded by the US government’s National Institute of Mental Health.  So "is anxiety inherited", yes.  Can we change the pattern of behaviour yes!

The more you understand panic attacks the better ready you will be to over coming panic attacks.

Thus what are the most common physical symptoms that may happen to you throughout a panic attack.  You’ll start to breathe more rapidly; your heart beat will speed up.  You may experience chest pain and maybe some dizziness and numbness.  You’ll begin to sweat and bear the motion of cold and hot sweats.

So what could be behind the fear of a panic attack.  It’s usually a fear of dying or some impending catastrophe.  It is often some kind of dread or doom scenario or feeling.  These feelings are caused as a result of a physical reaction that is occurring in your body.

Adrenaline is the reason for this, our body’s naturally go into the flight or fight syndrome as a result of the quantity of adrenaline that is being pumped around our body.  Adrenaline provides our bodies the false feeling of danger thus we react to that false sense of danger by going into a panic attack.

We can help ourselves to over coming panic attacks by watching our diet.  Strive to keep your caffeine levels low.  I used to drink a ton of tea, coffee and coke.  This amount of caffeine caused my heart to have palpitations.  Having palpitations used to send me into a panic attack, and because my heart was pumping so hard i thought i was going to die from a heart attack.  Thus I cut out coffee and coke.  It really helped my palpitations, which in turn cut down my panic attacks.

For me the most effective method to over coming panic attacks was after I actually believed that it was my thoughts that caused the panic attacks.  I had been told that it absolutely was my thoughts that where inflicting my anxiety and panics.  But I struggled with that for years and years.  The concept that I used to be inflicting my very own living hell was very hard for me to understand.  However I took small steps to intercept my thought patterns.  Because we do have automatic thought patterns that run when we start to go into a panic attack that feed the panic.

So start to watch your thoughts when you begin to go into a panic attack, the more conscious of your thoughts you are the more equipped you are to over coming panic attacks.