PANIC DISORDER
Panic disorder involves intense anxiety attacks that seem to occur out of nowhere and can feel overwhelming in the moment. At the time, there is no obvious trigger for the physiological experience of anxiety, and to the person experiencing the attack, that can make it seem that their problem is medical. Panic attacks are often misinterpreted as heart attacks or strokes. Even when it is understood that the problem lies within the connection between psychology and physiology, the experience of extreme panic is so unpleasant and hard to anticipate that people with panic disorder can experience significant anxiety about just the possibility of a panic attack: anxiety about anxiety.
Some people avoid certain situations or locations where they are concerned they would have a panic attack, and may be diagnosed with agoraphobia.
There can be a large amount of pain of suffering associated with panic attacks, including both the terror in the moment and the dread of future panic attacks that often strike without warning. People with panic disorder are are among those most likely to quickly seek treatment. Luckily, panic disorder can be effectively treated using empirically supported methods.
Panic Treatment Model
Panic operates as a powerful cycle, and treatment requires close understanding of what maintains each individual’s cycle and targeted intervention aimed at breaking it.
Panic typically begins with a trigger, but this trigger is often unknown to patients beginning therapy. It could be something like an irregular heartbeat, a subtle change in breathing, or thoughts of being trapped. These triggers can induce panic because they are perceived as threatening – “perhaps it’s a heart attack,” “I’m going to faint”, “what if I go crazy?” A person’s identification of this trigger as dangerous naturally leads to a rapid increase in anxiety, as the body prepares to fight or flee the danger. When the changes that come with body response to danger (such as increased heart rate, changes in breathing, tingling in the extremities, mental focus on possible threats, etc.) are themselves perceived as dangerous, the escalating cycle to panic takes hold. This can lead to increases in anxiety – anxiety about anxiety.
While this model is representative of the basics of panic, for each individual there are many other factors involved. These differentiating factors are important for individualizing treatment.
Panic Treatment at the Anxiety Treatment Center of Austin
At the Anxiety Treatment Center of Austin, the clinicians are well-trained in using cognitive and expectancy models of treatment and look for multiple places to interrupt the cycle of panic to try to cure panic disorder.
The focus is on changing interpretations of triggering bodily sensations so that they are understood for what they are rather than being interpreted as dangerous. The underlying beliefs that inadvertently promote the cycle of panic to get worse are targeted, and physiological methods to stop the body from escalating to panic when anxiety sets in are used. Most importantly, exposure and response prevention (ERP) is used to extinguish the connection between feared situations/bodily sensations and anxiety. This means that when triggers are experienced, the brain no longer responds with fear.
In essence, treatment breaks the chain of anxiety, bodily arousal, and panic that leads to the bodily sensations that make people feel out of control. At the end of successful treatment, uncomfortable feelings are recognized, understood, and accepted. The result is a reduction in panic symptoms.