Symptoms You Didn’t Know Could Be Caused By Panic Attacks

Panic attacks are an intense, physical form of anxiety. They are best known for their symptoms, which ramp up slowly over the course of 10 minutes before they peak and start a slow decline. Panic attacks are known to have symptoms that, in many ways, directly resemble what one would experience in a heart attack, including:

• Trouble Breathing
• Rapid Heartbeat
• Lightheadedness
• Chest Pains
• Feelings of Doom
• Rapid Thoughts

Those that live with panic attacks, or those that know someone that has, are often amazed by how significant and powerful these symptoms can be. They are often overwhelming, so intense that some people call the ambulance believing they are about to die. They are terrifying, and they are made even worse by the fact that fearing panic attacks can increase the likelihood that they come again.

The Stranger Symptoms of Panic

One of the other problems with panic attacks, especially panic disorder (frequent panic attacks and anxiety), is that traditional panic attack symptoms aren’t the only symptoms you may experience.

Indeed, panic provides such significant and long term stress on the body (along with a host of changes that we’ll discuss in a moment) that many people experience strange and unusual symptoms after awhile that are dissimilar from other anxiety symptoms, until they start to fear that “maybe it’s not a panic attack.”

What Causes Some of the Strangest Symptoms

When we talk about the “Strange” symptoms of panic attacks/anxiety, we’re talking about symptoms that don’t match the traditional list of symptoms that are best known to be linked to the panic disorder. Indeed, it could be argued that there are hundreds of symptoms that appear to have nothing to do with anxiety, but still occur in some people with panic disorder.

But why? Why are there so many strange symptoms of anxiety that aren’t really written about in the textbooks? The answer is some combination of the following:

• Long Term Stress

The primary cause of anxiety’s strangest symptoms is long term, persistent, severe stress. Every panic attack, your body is experiencing the same type of reaction it would if you were face to face with a rabid and hungry lion. When you’re not in the heart of a panic attack, you’re often still on edge, stressed, struggling with the stress that anxiety causes.

And long term stress does MANY different things to your body. It changes how you process food and nutrients. It affects your skin, your internal organs, your brain, your digestion, your hormones, your muscles. It affects almost every part of your body. So the longer you live with panic, the more the effects of that long term stress can pop up, and since stress can affect essentially everything your body does, that means that you can experience almost every physical and mental sensation that exists.

• Hyperventilation

Hyperventilation is responsible for most of the symptoms of panic attacks. When you hyperventilate, your blood vessels constrict, your thoughts race, you become lightheaded and have trouble breathing, and when those occur you may also start to have weird sensations in your legs, bladder, back, and more. Hyperventilation doesn’t cause as many strange symptoms as stress does, but what it does do is exacerbates them, making them more apparent and stressful.

• Hypersensitivity

Another reason is hypersensitivity, which itself is a symptom of anxiety and panic attacks. Hypersensitivity is the mind’s ability to be in touch with how the body feels and amplify it, and it is a very real, very well known symptom of anxiety.

So why does this matter?

Well, let’s say you DON’T have anxiety and experience a very slight issue (let’s say, a very mild leg pain). You may not even notice it, or you’d notice it but easily ignore it because it is so mild.

But if you struggle with hypersensitivity? Not only do you notice that leg pain immediately, but it feels more severe than it would for someone without anxiety, making it far more problematic.

Studies have shown that those with anxiety experience pain, discomfort, etc. more severely than those that don’t. It’s not because they are weaker – it is because hypersensitivity makes them so aware of it that their mind can’t focus on anything else, making it worse.

What this does, is it turns otherwise normal sensations into sensations that cause fear. In the leg pain example, a person without anxiety doesn’t worry about a mild leg pain. But a person with anxiety who feels the pain severely and immediately may worry that they have a ripped joint, or a blood clot in their leg, or some other type of pain. It creates symptoms out of thin air by making a person more aware of symptoms their body experiences naturally all the time.

Lesser Known Panic Attack Symptoms

The following are some of the many symptoms of anxiety that those with panic attacks and panic disorder may struggle with. Like all of anxiety, your symptoms are complex, and you may never experience any of the following symptoms, or you may experience all of them.

• Heartburn – Interestingly, heartburn can actually be a cause, not just a symptom of anxiety. But heartburn can also be caused by anxiety, since the tension in the stomach tends to increase stomach acids and weaken digestion.
• Yawning – Yawning is an instinctual result of hyperventilation. Your subconscious wants you to yawn so that you prove to yourself that you can still take in a lot of air (since trouble breathing is a common symptom of panic). The irony of this is that yawning can make panic worse, since it takes in more oxygen than you need, and the body tends to prevent you from successful yawns as a way of limiting your oxygen intake, causing further anxiety.
• Anhedonia/Depression – Depression itself is a symptom of anxiety. That’s because anxiety is stressful. But one symptom of depression that you may not have expected is anhedonia, which is the inability to feel or remember what joy and pleasure feel like. Some people experience anhedonia without any other depression symptoms after a severe panic attack.
• Auditory Hallucinations – No, you aren’t likely to start hearing voices. But stress can occasionally cause weird sounds in your ear, including loud popping sounds. In addition, anxiety makes you on edge. When you’re on edge, you start hearing things in other sounds, so a gust of wind may sound like someone said your name. All of this is normal.
• Trouble Walking/Gait Problems – Panic attacks can make you hyper-aware of your body, so that movements that used to be automatic become manual. Imagine if you had to tell your body how to move each muscle to walk. That happens when anxiety makes you become too aware of your body.
• Changes to Underarm Smell – Stress changes your body chemistry, and that also changes the bacteria (good and bad) that live on your body. That means you may start to have smellier armpits than ever before.
• Needing to Pee/Poop – Your mind can only handle a specific amount of tasks at a time. Panic attacks can be so overwhelming, that your body focuses on the panic and moves resources away from other areas of the brain. One of those areas is the part of the brain that holds in urination and defecation. That’s why you may find you need to go urgently.

These are only some of the many strange and unexpected symptoms that can be caused by anxiety and panic attacks. That doesn’t mean that you will experience any of these symptoms. But it’s good to remind yourself that if you ever feel a strange symptom you did not expect, the reason may still be anxiety. EVERYTHING can be a symptom of anxiety, simply because of the way anxiety can affect you.