If you’ve had a panic attack, you may have noticed some or all of these effects.
The term panic attack is actually misleading. It’s actually a panic defence. The physical effects you might notice are your body gearing up to keep you safe from a threat. Back in our evolutionary past, this might have been a large animal like a tiger about to attack, for example. Here's the same list of effects with their purpose next to them.
| Change | Purpose |
| Heart racing | To pump more blood to your muscles to give you emergency strength |
| Fast breathing | To take in more oxygen to be ready for action |
| Sweating | To k eep you cool during the anticipated exertion. |
| Shaking | Your muscles are ready to go! If you tried to run at this time, you’d probably go the fastest you’ve ever been. If you don’t run, though, the muscles can shake like a car that’s at full revs but not in gear. |
| Dizziness | This emergency power response alters the oxygen levels in your blood, which is what causes the dizziness. |
| Nausea, lump in the throat | Well if you had a big animal about to attack you, you wouldn’t want to stop for a bite to eat, would you! |
| Hard to think straight | Your ‘thinking brain’ (called the neo-cortex) is very clever but rather slow. In an emergency, your fight or flight survival mechanism can temporarily shut it down in order to switch to quick, simple instinctive responses until the danger has passed. That’s why people often have ‘crazy’ thoughts during a panic attack. |
There’s nothing at all wrong with these changes. If you ever did find yourself in a dangerous situation, you’d be pretty pleased to have them. You can be reassured that your emergency defence mechanism is working just fine. It’s just firing off at the wrong time.
It is rare to be pounced on by a tiger in modern life, of course. So why do people get panic attacks even when there’s no actual threat?
If you have had a scary experience in a particular place or situation, part of your emergency response system called the amygdala stores certain information about it so it can keep you safe in the future. It might be a colour, smell, location, sound – anything at all. If it senses something similar to that in the future, it can fire off the panic attack just in case. It is called ‘conditioning.’ After a while you might begin associating a situation with having a panic attack, reinforcing the unconscious learning.
The second possible cause is if you have been anxious or stressed in general. If you have had high levels of anxiety, it can put your emergency response on a hair trigger so it’s just about to go off at any time. It might fire off randomly, for no reason. Some people’s panic attacks remain in that random stage. But your amygdala, the part of your emergency response that stores ‘red alert’ information, doesn’t learn logically; it learns emotionally. So if you have a peak of anxiety, it remembers it and the same conditioning occurs whether it was actually dangerous or not. That’s how even an insignificant event can start a pattern of panic attacks.
All very well. But what to do?
It’s all about unconscious emotional learning. Just as part of you might have learned to get panicked in a particular situation, it can learn to be calm again. Once you have been calmer in that situation, the response will be less next time and so on until you are fine again.
If you’ve tried and found yourself stuck, though (and many people do), hypnosis can help. The panic attacks are started by unconscious emotional learning and that’s how they pass too. A skilled hypnotherapist can soothe memories of any bad experiences, which removes the conditioning. He or she can also use hypnosis to allow to you remember how to turn down your unconscious panicky response and relax.
It doesn’t involve anything unpleasant. In fact the whole point is to make life more pleasant! It doesn’t involve anything weird like swinging watches either. You can do whatever you want -- the hypnotherapist has no ‘power’ over you. He or she can simply help you do what you want to do.
If you would like to have an introduction to hypnosis you can download my Hypnosis and How to Use it To Cure Common Problems right now here. It comes with a 90-day no-quibble money-back guarantee so you can't lose!
If you would like to see me in person and begin to feel calmer straight away, you call 01273 732690 or click here to see my rates and my hypnotherapy practice in Brighton and Hove.