What is the fear of Heart attacks?
It’s the most common fear. There’s a very widespread, and enormously pernicious myth, among the general population and even among some mental health professionals, and probably you also share it. This myth is to think that anxiety provokes heart failures. This is completely false!
In order for a cardiac arrest to be produced, it has to be influenced by a series of genetic organic variables, way of living and even age and gender. A person can suffer some type of heart attack if he/she has several of these characteristics: some serious base injury in the heart or the surrounding arteries, a high excess of oily acids in blood, inadequate diet and/or overweight, sedentary life without any physical activity, excessive consumption of alcohol and tobacco or other drugs, family background, problematic age and being a man. The stress is a last variable that combined with the previous ones increases the risk. Now, it must be clear that the stress on its own does not cause heart attacks.A person, in the middle of the most terrible of panic attacks, is not going to suffer any type of heart attack if they don’t bring together a good number of the enumerated characteristics, and, even this way, the probability would still be low.
A very common physiological phenomenon that causes panic attacks is to notice a sudden raise in the cardiac rate. The heart is designed to rise and to go down at a sharp pace when the body needs it. Just imagine the beating of an athlete’s heart in the middle of a competition. When we feel anxious, our heart speeds up to send more blood and oxygen to the tissues and muscles because, if you remember, your organism prepares itself to run or to fight.] Unlike what everybody thinks, the constant rise of the heart rate that a person with panic could notice, more than damaging the heart what it does is training it to be stronger. Next time you feel your heart beating very fast, just remember your training session just started!