This week I was thinking about the feeling of panic. I don’t necessarily want to write about panic attacks because I don’t think that everyone is able to relate to having one. Plus, I tend to think that this term can be, at times, overused and misunderstood within the general public. I’m also not gearing this blog to people who’ve been diagnosed with panic disorder, which is when panic or panic attacks reach a level that it drastically interferes with one’s life. If you look up information about panic attacks you may find differing definitions about what they are and the symptoms involved. This is interesting to explore, but today I’ll be writing about panic in a more general sense.
Some people will certainly say that they’ve never had a panic attack, but I think everyone has had moments of feeling panic. While anxiety may be a term that characterizes a spectrum of low to high intensity feelings, Panic is extremely intense and completely dysregulating. If anxiety is like the volume dial on the stereo allowing the music to be anywhere from quiet to loud, panic is an air horn–only incredibly loud. If we’re in panic, we don’t really think. Instead, we just react.
It has been challenging to find good information for this blog because most of my searches brought up articles about panic attacks, which again, not everyone has experienced. I saw some links for Reddit feeds, like, “What is the evolutionary advantage of panic?” These were a little closer to what I was looking for, but Reddit isn’t exactly a great scientific resource. Then I finally found a great article* on Psychology Today about how panic can be a life saver. They start off by saying that many experiences of panic are a “false-positive,” and they compare this to Covid screenings where a false-positive (testing positive when someone isn’t infected) would mean that you had to stay home when you didn’t actually have Covid. A false-negative, on the other hand (testing negative when someone does have the virus), would mean that you might have allowed yourself to be in situations where you infected others. Given these two possible mistakes, a false positive is probably better than a false negative in many situations. Dr. Rosmarin, who wrote this article, points out that experiencing panic is an indication that someone has a fully functional fight-or-flight response. This is exactly what they need in the event of a life-threatening emergency. He wrote about an encounter with a client who was experiencing frequent panic, and he asked her to share a time when she was truly unsafe. She reported a time in which she was playing catch with her kids and went to retrieve the ball as it rolled toward the street. As she reached the road, a car was barreling directly toward her that she hadn’t previously seen. Her body reacted immediately and she jumped out of the way before she could even process what was happening. Afterward, her stomach was in knots and she was dealing with the after-effects of an adrenaline burst. Dr. Rosmarin pointed out to his client that if she didn’t have a fully functioning panic response, she probably would’ve been hit by the car.
The article* mentions the body’s fear response to a life-threatening situation as:
Dilated pupils which increase the field of vision.
Digestion slows so that energy is available in the muscles.
Blood flow is pulled into the torso so that the organs are functioning at their peak.
Muscles become tense and ready for increased strength.
The heart beats faster and breathing increases in order to flood muscles with oxygen.
When we experience* panic, all of these threat responses occur, which are actually physically uncomfortable, and the panic may not involve life-threatening situations. Dr. Rosmarin recommends that people try to view feelings of panic as a false-positive and an indication that their body is responding exactly the way it should in order to protect them. In this way, it becomes possible to make peace with the reaction because it means that their bodies are trying to protect them. This runs counter to what I often hear from clients who are dealing with intense panic. They tend to worry that it means something is wrong with them. By understanding that their bodies are trying to protect them (but getting the wrong message about the level of danger they are in) people can learn to work on calming the body back down without unnecessarily shaming themselves.
I think that for most people panic is unpredictable. It just sort of happens when something really awful happens and we have to respond to it. Panic attacks are often reported that way too, and sometimes people will say that nothing bad happened prior to the attack…the feelings just came out of nowhere. In any case, panic is undeniably uncomfortable. We can’t get rid of panic because doing so would be to get rid of our entire fear-response, and this is responsible for keeping us alive in dangerous situations. We can start to teach ourselves to understand and embrace this (potentially) life-saving physiological response. In doing so, we can realize something very important about panic, which is that the feelings themselves are not dangerous. They are a system of reactions designed to save our lives.