Credit Cards Can Lead to Anxiety Attacks
Your credit card company sends you a letter advising that your interest rates are going up 40%. You can just make the minimum payment today and you have no idea how you will cover a new, much higher, minimum payment.
How do you react?
If your first emotion is anger and it motivates you to pick up the phone and call the credit card company that’s healthy. If you take it calmly and analyze what your options are and then act on them, that’s healthy.
If your reaction is a physical one, faster hear rate, sweaty palms or a tightness in your chest, that’s an anxiety attack. Anxiety attacks can lead to larger physical and emotional problems and that obviously, is not healthy.
Overwhelming credit card debt, increased interest rates or credit lines slashed can trigger anxiety. If those events cause you to experience a shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat or a general state of uneasiness you are probably having an anxiety attack. To counter those symptoms it is important to understand what anxiety really is.
Michael Knowles, a renowned Life Coach has this to say about anxiety:
Anxiety is a state of mind and a label we use to describe a set of physical symptoms we experience. The physical symptoms, rapid breathing, tightness in chest etc., actually happen faster than we can think. The thoughts we have about these symptoms are simply our minds trying to explain them.
Bad biochemistry can result in anxiety, however for most people it is a state of mind, specifically a regressive trance.
Regressive trance state is triggered by a fundamental fear experience that happened sometime in the past. That experience then projects irrational fears for the future. Say you were seriously bitten by a dog as a kid. Walking past a dog today could trigger an attack that would project you being horribly mauled. It’s irrational but real to you.
While it sounds like a cheap science fiction movie, when we are in a state of anxiety we are existing in a fearful past and a terrible future at the same time.
A second cause of anxiety is biochemical. Our bodies are unique sacs of chemicals. My biochemistry is different from yours, as yours is different from anyone else’s. That’s why no one pill works for all people.
So you’re having an attack, what do you do? Remember the symptoms are caused by being in the past and the future at the same time. What you need to do is ground yourself in the present. A quick way to do this is to survey your body head to toe and describe the symptoms aloud in “grounded” terms. My neck is stiff is a grounded term. My neck is unbearably stiff is not.
As you examine how you feel in the present you will notice that the symptoms of the attack will lesson. Remember that anxiety is a state of mind. It has to be controlled so you can function. Your credit problems may be real but they are not as bad as anxiety projects them to be.