What Causes Anxiety Attacks and Why Are They So Scary?
Anxiety attacks can happen without warning, but they don’t happen without a reason. Something else has been going on in the background and some sort of ‘trigger’ has then sparked-off the attack. That ‘something else in the background’ is general anxiety, i.e. higher-than-normal levels of daily anxiety. And the trigger is usually a highly stressful event or situation, which may even have occurred some time before the actual attack. You see, an anxiety attack — also called a panic attack — isn’t the same as having a normal, short burst of stress / anxiety. For example, the normal reaction to an unexpected event like having to brake suddenly to avoid a child in the road. It normally takes just a short time for a person with normal levels of daily anxiety to recover from that.
