Biological Causes of Panic Attacks

Video Transcript

Hi. This is Ben Brennan from Austin, Texas. I'm coming to you on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to be talking about panic attacks. Okay, now I'd like to talk to you about the biological causes of panic attacks. Let's start with the "flight or fight response." You may remember this from your college or high school psychology class. This is where the sympathetic nervous system pumps adrenaline through the body, where your heart rate and breathing rate increase without you even controlling them. It does this automatically to prepare you to either fight your foe or to run away. This served early man really well. A lot of their dangers and stresses and fears came as a result of attacks from bears, maybe a lion. If they lived long ago, maybe dinosaurs even. We'd have these physical stressers and these physical dangers that we'd react to and our fear would set off this fight or flight response that would allow us to survive the situation and live on to live another day. So that was great for early man. For us, it's not so great. A lot of our stressers and fears and perceived dangers come from things like social situations. Many of us are anxious about public speaking, speaking in front of a camera, or any number of things...stress at work, financial situations...When we have these situations, the fight or flight response does not serve us near as well as it did early man. What the fight or flight response will do is create the same symptoms, the same increased breathing, increased heart rate and adrenaline, but all this is going through your body preparing you to have this physical action and you just have to sit there. Let's say you are on a bus, and you get really anxious about someone who is sitting next to you, but you can't run away. You have to sit there while your body is going crazy. You know, your heart rate is rising, and you are breathing heavy. This can actually cause more anxiety. This is kind of one of the biological roots of panic attacks. Where when experiencing anxiety, your heart will start beating, you'll start breathing really heavy, you'll have this adrenaline, but you'll be frustrated and cause stress because you won't be able to exert it. And when you are experiencing these symptoms for no reason, you can have a panic attack because your thoughts will kick in and you'll start thinking "why am I having this? I need to control my body." But, you are not in control of it because your sympathetic nervous system after thousands of years has adapted to protect you from physical danger. So, you are experiencing all of these symptoms and you are starting to panic about that. That can result in the first or recurring panic attacks for an individual.

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