Is this my mom’s fault? Is this my fault? Why did this happen to me and not my brother? These are probably only some of the questions that are percolating through your mind as you struggle to understand and control your anxiety disorder.

Understanding the causes of your anxiety disorder is important in assisting to resolve the problems you are facing. While relaxation techniques can be implemented with or without understanding the source of your anxiety, they will be more effective if you work to uncover the reasons for your anxiety.

Understanding why you are anxious and what triggers your anxiety or panic attacks will help you employ your relaxation tools more timely and effectively. A deeper understanding of your anxiety and panic attacks will also help to resolve them.

Sometimes, simply understanding why something is happening to you can relieve an enormous burden and reduce the frequency of your panic. You don´t have to continue to ask yourself, why me? Once you know the triggers, you can work to control your fears.

However, in seeking understanding you probably won´t find clear answers. Finding the one right answer will be elusive because there are so many reasons people develop anxiety disorders.

Your anxiety disorder, your panic attacks are probably the result of a combination of hereditary, biology, family background and upbringing, conditioning, recent stresses, your personal belief system, chemical imbalances in the brain or your ability to express feelings and more.

There is some evidence that panic attacks may be an inherited risk. But blaming your parents isn´t the answer; there is also a lot of evidence to indicate that panic attacks are a learned response that can happen in healthy people when specific circumstances occur.

There are a number of people who believe that there is a single cause and even a single solution to anxiety conditions. This is not true; anxiety conditions are often the result of a confluence of participating causes which are most often both biological and psychological.

You may have grown up in a horrible environment, where your parents neglected, abandoned and abused you. While this awful treatment in your childhood probably contributed to the anxiety disorder you have today, there are a lot of children who grew up in a similar environment but didn´t develop panic attacks, or obsessive compulsion, or phobias or any kind of anxiety.

Why you and not them? The answer is, it´s not only psychological, it´s biological too! You were probably predisposed to an anxiety condition that was then triggered by the stresses of your childhood.

Many researchers believe that a certain part of the brain called the locus cerelus is the cause of panic disorders. While your local cerelus malfunctions during a panic attack, other peoples may not. Moreover, the cause of your malfunction may be psychological in nature, a build up of stress, anger or other repressed feelings.