Panic attacks can be as confusing as they are alarming. After all, while there are commonalities, everyone experiences them slightly differently. Looking them up online, we see they are described as ‘moments of intense irrational fear’, ‘episodes of high anxiety with no clear explanation’ or ‘spikes of adrenaline and cortisol in the body’. This is a bit like saying that The Lord Of The Rings books are about a really long walk; technically true, but missing a lot of detail, and people will argue with you about it.
One common symptom is a tension, or feeling of palpitations in the abdomen. Sometimes it can come on in the chest, which has previously caused people to think they’re having a heart attack. Others include tears, irritability, shortness of breath, excess sweating, or even simply ‘freezing’; being unable to say or do anything because there’s some kind of ‘mental block’ in the way.
The important thing to remember is this: of course the symptoms are going to be different for everyone. This is because everyone experiences emotions differently, and that’s where the problem lies. If it was a disease, it would have the same symptoms in everyone, however the panic attack is created in one’s own subconscious mind, and all of our minds are unique.
So why do panic attacks happen?
Well, like a lot of our experiences, it’s a good idea to look at evolution. Anxiety is obviously a big contributing factor to panic attacks, so let’s start there.
Anxiety exists, in its basest form, as an alarm system. For neolithic humans, it was the emotion that would keep them alive when they were threatened. When something scary like a big angry bear turns up, the human will get a spike of fear, and that fear will cause them to run away. When they escape, the fear will dissipate and become anxiety. Anxiety is very good at keeping you awake and aware. This means that if the bear catches up, the human will already be on their guard, and actively looking out for it.
At length, the human escapes and gets back to their tribe. Now they’re safe, others are watching out for them, the situation is resolved and the anxiety can start to subside. Its job is done.
However, in modern life, this doesn’t happen.
Let’s say you go into the office one morning, you’re a little bit late, and you get told off for it. Our primitive brain doesn’t have any rationally appropriate responses to this, because we didn’t evolve in offices. Therefore, it gives you anxiety. After all, if the boss is angry with you, then you might get fired and be unable to afford to live….so this is a threat to you, albeit an indirect one. Your emergency system evolved to run away and escape threats. You can’t just run off home in this case. In fact, you’ll have to stay in an environment that contains something your subconscious has identified as an active threat. With a full work day ahead, you’ll probably have more stress piled on top of that, too. And you’re going to have to come back tomorrow, where your boss might still be in a mood.
We find ourselves stuck in situations that create the anxiety response with no way of escaping or resolving it. We can’t run we can’t fight, we can’t hide, we just have to push on, while still feeling the anxiety. This means we are experiencing the anxiety response for FAR longer stretches of time, compared to our ancestors. Those adrenaline and cortisol chemicals pickle our brain to the point where our nervous system becomes unregulated. All of a sudden, we’re having trouble breathing. We’re experiencing palpitations, acid reflux, sweating, IBS, hives. It throws the body into chaos, and that overload is like rolling a dice; every body is different, so it’ll be different for everybody.
So how do we fix it?
In the above metaphor, your subconscious believes your boss is equivalent to a dangerous wild animal, and it is activating the fear response to keep you safe. I’ve kept the metaphor simple, but this also applies to other situations, where there is the presence of an individual or situation that either a) makes you feel threatened or b) reminds you of a time when you did feel threatened eg a trauma.
You remove panic attacks permanently by properly educating the subconscious on what is, and is not a threat. That way, it will only activate your fear response when it is appropriate. Far and away the most effective way to educate your subconscious is through hypnosis.
Hypnosis itself is able to bring you into a relaxed state, even when your body is highly tense, so it’s perfect for getting you to an even emotional keel. After that, hypnosis can treat trauma, or any past experience that has caused you to incorrectly interpret a situation as dangerous. This will make it impossible for it to affect you any more.
This doesn’t even have to be a long process. Some traumas can be resolved in as little as half an hour. When I start seeing a new client, I usually advise them that we may need an average of 10-15 sessions to resolve things, but often we sort out most of their bigger traumas by session 5.
We need to remember that panic attacks are ultimately a short-circuit in the body. They happen because we changed the environment we lived in, but we never changed our responses. However, that’s the thing about humans; we’re adaptable. And with a little learning, we can escape from any danger that’s pursuing us, even if it’s in our heads.