Self Help for Panic Attacks:  Ignore Depression at Your Own Risk

Depression lowers our threshold for tolerance of everyday stressors.   Depression and panic attacks are lovers. When one appears the other is usually not far behind. In fact, often people who convince themselves they are not depressed finally seek help for panic attacks. What is the relationship between panic attacks and depression?

Depression and Self Help for Panic Attacks

The shortest answer to this question is that depression undercuts our baseline stress tolerance. Everyone has their own "normal" tension level. Also, everyone has a threshold above which the symptoms of anxiety attacks begin. There are always going to be days when the driver in front of us cuts us off and someone at work does something to make our job more difficult. Most people have developed various coping mechanisms to deal with the normal stressors of daily living. We crack a joke, we distract ourselves or find some other way to manage our emotions and move on. When we have a high tolerance for stress, we take irritations in stride and quickly recover. We don't have a panic attack in those situations. Self help for panic attacks relies heavily on our learning new coping mechanisms.  If the old ones were working we wouldn't be having panic attacks and we wouldn't be feeling the symptoms of anxiety attacks.

Coping mechanisms act like a bridge that supports the weight of stressful situations that roll across our lives every day. If the bridge is strong and can support heavy traffic, then we have a higher stress tolerance. If our bridge is shaky, then the activity on that bridge becomes even more burdensome. Depression works like termites in the supporting beams of the self help bridge. It’s unnerving to hear the bridge creak and groan while it sways under pressure.

Depression Clogs Self Help for Panic Attacks

Here is another way of thinking of the role that depression can play in self help for panic attacks. Imagine a house with an air conditioner. As the outside temperature rises (stress => anxiety => panic) the heat may never meet the threshold for what that air conditioner can handle (stress tolerance). In other words, the air conditioner has a high tolerance for heat. But there comes a point at which the air in the room starts feeling very warm. At some point, the capacity of the air conditioner will be overwhelmed by rising heat. Everyone has a threshold for stress, but depression lowers it the way a clogged filter will hamper an air conditioner trying to cool hot air.

Depression lowers our stress tolerance: it makes us sweat over things that normally would not make us sweat. It can also make us panic about our combined difficulties as we peer through the lens of hopelessness. It makes self help for panic attacks difficult because of lower motivation to actually use a program for self help for panic attacks. How heated up do things need to be before you can no longer keep it cool? How much irritation does it take to make you hot under the collar? 80? 90? 110 degrees? Whatever it is, that is your current stress tolerance. Depression often reduces the capacity of our air conditioner to handle the “heat” of everyday life. We have a lower threshold for tolerating stressful activities, events, and interactions.

Conclusion: Depression Creates Obstacles to Self Help

It is no surprise, then, that people who are depressed are often irritable and get angry more easily. It also helps to explain why depression nudges us to withdraw from activities: we have to close off some rooms so that the smaller air conditioner has less volume to keep cool. Depression can degrade our sleep or our concentration making it harder to handle situations well throughout the day. If we handle a situation by making it worse, then we move through the day creating more problems and more strain. It's not hard to see that this mindset makes it more difficult to deal with the frustrations of any learning curve, including self help for panic attacks.