Herbal Solutions for Panic Attacks

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Shirley Allen

If you have ever had a panic attack, you don’t look forward to another one. The “fight-or flight” response in your body is involuntarily turned on and your nervous system signals your adrenal glands to start pumping out stress hormones to get you ready to either run away or turn and fight.

Your muscles tense, your heartbeat speeds up, and your breathing becomes more rapid. You might feel like you are smothering, claustrophobic, or you may experience an urgency to get away. On top of that, you may get hot flashes, sweating, and/or chills and trembling, plus numbness, tingling sensations, dizziness, and nausea.

You become overwhelmed by an extreme sense of fear and impending disaster and you lose your ability to think calmly and clearly while experiencing a distorted sense of time and a feeling of unreality.

In the face of a physical threat, accident, or natural disaster, this type of response is normal and can be life-saving. But panic attacks that occur unexpectedly Continue reading →

What is Benzodiazepine?

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Shirley Allen

Anxiety disorders, like social phobia and panic disorder, can be treated with a number of medications. One such medication is benzodiazepine, commonly known as benzos.

Benzos are tranquilizers. Words that you’ll hear used to describe these drugs include hypnotic, sedative, anxiolytic, muscle relaxant, and amnesic. They work, in short, by slowing down your central nervous system.

As well as for Anxiety disorders, they are also prescribed for a number of other conditions including insomnia, seizures, muscle spasms, and alcohol withdrawal. Dentists also sometimes use benzos in their work. Those who abuse

Image via Wikipedia

stimulant drugs, such as speed, sometimes also abuse benzos to come down from the high. Common drugs classified as benzos include Xanax, Valium, Serax, Rohypnol, Halcion, Librium, Mogadon, and Ativan, among others.

There are a number of side effects to consider if you are thinking about using benzos to treat your anxiety disorder. First and foremost, some benzos are extremely addictive. While some users report no addictive feelings, others report complete addiction in as little as a few days. It depends on the strength of the drug you are using and your body’s specific reaction to it. Continue reading →

Do You Suffer from Anxiety or Panic Attacks?

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Shirley Allen

From my knowledge of the people I have met in my life, I suspect that memories of very early childhood are usually caused by bad things that happened to us. For instance, my daughter had a very uneventful early life and can’t remember a single thing about it before she was 7 – at which point we moved away from everyone she knew and she had to “start all over again” so to speak. I, on the other hand, had a ghastly childhood and can remember right back to when I was 2, when I fell into the reservoir on the farm where I lived with my parents.

I have suffered from panic attacks for as long as I can remember, and it says a lot about them when I tell you that my husband, to whom I have been married for 39 years, told me that until he saw my book Anxiety and Panic Attack Solutionshe had no idea that I had

Panic-attack (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

panic attacks at all! He knew, of course, that I was extremely claustrophobic, and absolutely terrified of spiders, but I always appeared to be “calmly petrified” (if there is such a thing) and he had no idea that my insides were tying themselves in knots and I was struggling to breathe.

SYMPTOMS

Anyone who has had a panic attack will recognize the following symptoms but, as everyone is different, you may not experience all of them at once. However, even if only a few of them occur at the same time you are probably having a full-blown panic attack. And if it happens repeatedly it is likely that you are suffering from Continue reading →