So what really is an anxiety or panic attack? Perhaps you don’t suffer from it yourself, but you know someone who does and you want to better understand it. If so, the preceding section probably only made sense half of the time, and you still haven’t got a clue as to what makes panic and anxiety tick.

Like many mentally harmful problems anxiety disorders aren’t easy to explain. Putting it in simple terms might seem to be trivializing it whereas using big medical words just makes it all that much harder to understand. So hoping that you won’t think I’m trivializing what can be a debilitating condition to most sufferers, myself included, I’ll try and put it in an easy to understand manner.

If you got the gist of what I was saying earlier, both anxiety and panic are natural reactions that everybody feels from time to time. The trigger for either feeling can be different for each person although a few situations exist that are universally thought of as panic inducing and stress filled.

Another good example of such a situation that I can give you would be along the lines of public speaking. Not many of us can successfully walk up onto a stage without feeling at least some form of anxiety. This is normal and we can generally fudge our way through it managing to overcome our feelings.

What happens with the debilitating kind of anxiety attack is that you freeze up and are completely unable to cope with the situation. Time might seem to go slower and you might be feeling removed from your feelings, seeing things from the outside as it were. You might go through a number of different stages of panic, from a racing heartbeat to sweaty palms to cold shivers running up and down your back. The only constant factor is your intense feelings of helplessness.

For the person who hasn’t suffered from a panic attack all of this might seem slightly ridiculous but let me assure you that it’s not. What I just described was very real and something that I went through before I was able to find a way to cope with the constant anxiety and panic attacks by myself. The hardest part that I remember from that day was the aftermath. Not only did I freeze up on the podium unable to deliver my speech, but I also had to deal with the humiliation that accompanied the whole debacle.

The added attention of people being kind and asking me if I needed anything, the covert looks that I received from yet other people were all bad. However, perhaps worst of all for me were the pitying looks accompanied by a slightly strained I-don’t-know-what-to-say kind of look from the people who were milling about in confusion around me.

I have since then managed to walk up onto a stage and give a short address, but this was only possible through intense hard work on my part. So when I say that you can do it, you can conquer your Anxiety and Panic Attacks - I’m speaking from experience. Hopefully I’ve managed to convey what I feel in a manner conducive to ease of understanding, and you’re now comfortable with moving on to the next chapter to find out how you can first cope with your anxiety before moving on to finding a suitable cure.