Secondary Anxiety – Why Is It Important to Know How to Deal With It?

Secondary anxiety is the anxiety manufactured when we try to fight the ordinary anxieties that come into our lives. Knowing how to deal with anxiety that is secondary, is the most important thing we can do if we want to avoid major anxiety or even panic attacks! This article explains secondary anxiety.

It doesn’t matter who you are, what you do for a living, if you are a man or a woman, or if you are a child or an adult. Anxiety will find you. An unavoidable part of life is stress. Why this is, I am not sure. Perhaps it has something to do with Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. I really have no idea why it happens. Still, stress does punish us all the way through our lives.

Panic Attacks are Constructed from Layers of Stress

Even though everyone lives with stress, only a relatively small percentage of us experience anxiety attacks and/or panic attacks. This fact leads us to secondary anxiety. People who experience panic attacks are not people who experience greater amounts of stress than people who do not experience panic attacks. Also, people who experience panic attacks are not somehow inferior to people who do not experience them. Finally, there is nothing mentally or physically wrong with a person who has panic attacks.

In most cases, people who have panic attacks have them because they do not deal properly deal with the primary bouts of anxiety that occur in their lives. For example, we all have to face our bosses and get berated from time to time. We all have to face up to things even when we don’t want to. On top of that, we all get jilted, ignored and all of our cars break down once in a while.

We Manufacture Secondary Anxiety

All these things are causes of primary anxiety. The problem is, primary anxiety brings with it feelings that are very uncomfortable. When we tried to push away these feelings or when we work hard to overcome them, we actually cause another kind of anxiety. This kind of anxiety is secondary anxiety.

Without secondary anxiety the little things in life just flow by us. Yes, there are times when we will feel nervous, but anxiety attacks never develop unless secondary anxiety is present. This means, the key to avoiding panic attack lies in accepting life’s stresses.

However, when we pay too much attention to our stress, we compound our worry and misery and this causes us to try harder to avoid stress. This, in turn, brings with it more secondary anxiety. As this happens, we are building a panic attack. The bottom line is, a panic attack will never get off the ground without secondary anxiety and whether or not secondary anxiety occurs is up to us.