The title really says it all, I’ve never fully understood how people’s brains can just attack them like that. I’ve also never fully understood anxiety and depression, even though I’ve had both for the better part of the 17 years ive been alive.
In: Biology
A panic attack is just your brain firing off your fight-or-flight response when there’s nothing actually dangerous happening. Think of like a hyper-sensitive fire alarm that goes off even when there’s no smoke or fire.
Our fight-or-flight response is an automatic physiological reaction that happens to prepare us for a dangerous situation. Say you’re walking in the woods and you happen upon a bear. The bear is angry and it charges at you. To survive, you’ll either need to fight, or run away (flight). This response instantly readies your body to do those things.
A panic attack is when this response is triggered in the absence of a threat. Panic attacks or anxiety disorders can have both psychological and physiological components. For example, if a person experience trauma, they might be more prone to anxiety and panic attacks. A person who has anxiety or panic attacks might also have an imbalance of chemicals in the brain.
the tl;dr answer is that brains are weird.
Let’s say that you are afraid of flying. Imagine the amount of anxiety you would feel getting into a plane, when it is taking off, during some mild turbulence, and when it is landing. Some people can get this reaction without having to be scared of anything. It just happens. Your brain decides that there is an immediate and serious threat to you even though there isn’t, and your brain tells your body to either fight or run away.
As for why it happens, my understanding is that there is an imbalance in some neurotransmitters in your noggin and it makes something boring very important to your brain.
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