Anxiety is a mental health disorder. But it also causes a wide range of physical symptoms. Most of us have an understanding that when we’re anxious, we expect to feel sweaty, have a rapid heartbeat, feel light headed, and more. If you have panic attacks, this is even more pronounced, with chest pains, muscle weakness, and a wide variety of other symptoms.
Many of these symptoms, specially for those that have anxiety attacks, are caused not directly by anxiety itself but by the hyperventilation that anxiety triggers. Anxiety makes you breathe faster. As you breathe faster and more shallow (meaning, less full breaths). Typically, you breathe in, your body takes the oxygen and starts converting it to carbon dioxide, and then you expel it.
But when you hyperventilate, this causes you to expel more CO2 before your body has a chance to create more of it. Your body needs CO2 to operate efficiently, and when it doesn’t have that, your heart beats harder, you feel more lightheaded, and your anxiety symptoms get significantly worse.
Now, the most important takeaway of this is that the primary cause is too much oxygen and too little carbon dioxide, because your body isn’t creating it fast enough to account for how quickly you’re breathing it out.
But hyperventilation also causes one confusing symptom that can make anxiety much worse.
It also causes a feeling as though you’re not getting enough *oxygen*.
When you hyperventilate, you feel like you’re not breathing enough – like you’re not getting enough air. As a result, you either breathe faster or try to breathe bigger (like yawning) to try to get more oxygen in your system.
The result?
You make hyperventilation worse, which in turn makes your anxiety symptoms worse. One of the reasons that panic attacks can be so severe is that, during the attack, a person is typically trying as hard as they can to get more air all while they need to try to make more carbon dioxide. The symptoms get progressively more severe until they peak.
How to Address This Confusing Symptom
Psychotherapy is the best way to address anxiety and panic disorder, but a part of the psychotherapy process is education. The more you know and understand about panic disorder and its symptoms, the easier it becomes to try to prevent more significant attacks.
This is why part of treatment is education, and in this case, educating you specifically on this symptom – the idea that you are going to need to fight the urge to take deeper breaths, and instead remember to slow down your breathing (and even hold your breath!) could help reduce the severity of your symptoms dramatically.
Now, slowing down your breathing is unlikely to stop a panic attack that has already started. But the less severe your symptoms, the easier it becomes to feel emboldened to treat your panic attacks and anxiety. At Flourish Psychology, we want to be there for those that are struggling and help them with the next steps of bringing their anxiety under control. If you need help for yourself or a loved one, please reach out to our team, today.