Understanding Panic Attacks & Effective Treatment

How Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Can Help Manage Panic Attacks

What You'll Learn:

What a panic attack feels like and why it happens
Why panic disorder develops and how it impacts daily life
How Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) helps break the cycle of panic

Panic attacks feel overwhelming and sudden.

If you have ever experienced a sudden feeling of foreboding, having the urgent thought “I have to get out of here,” tightness in your chest, feeling like you can’t breathe, feeling like the world has an “unreal” quality to it, tunnel vision, nausea, and/or rapid heart rate that seem to come out of nowhere—you have likely experienced a panic attack.

Your body’s fear response is powerful and automatic.

Even if you experience panic attacks, the good news is that your body is capable of responding to a threat in the environment very quickly. Your nervous system is firing on all cylinders! It’s actually quite impressive when we take a minute to appreciate all of the biological systems that your body is able to initiate without any conscious thought or effort. Chemical and electrical signals enable a redistribution of blood to your major muscle groups, the dilation of your pupils, tightening of your vocal cords, and tunnel vision, to name a few. These all have adaptive functions for our survival if we’re in a truly dangerous situation. The bad news in panic disorder is that your threat detection system is in overdrive—typically detecting threat when there is none and erroneously sending signals throughout your body to prepare to protect itself from danger.

Panic attacks are not dangerous, but they can control your life.

Panic attacks are not inherently dangerous. However, they are extremely uncomfortable—even to the point that people often believe they are dying of a heart attack. Panic attacks also have an insidious way of making sufferers limit their day-to-day lives. If you had a panic attack on the subway, perhaps you now decide you are going to walk everywhere despite this creating a significant inconvenience. Maybe you eventually don’t leave the house without a trusted person. As anxiety gets bigger, your life gets smaller. It often becomes a really tough way to live.

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is an effective treatment for panic disorder.

Fortunately, panic disorder is highly treatable. Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is a therapeutic intervention that disrupts the negative relationship that panic sufferers develop with their own bodies. In panic disorder, you become afraid of your body’s own fear response. By gradually and purposefully exposing oneself to uncomfortable bodily sensations associated with panic, the brain becomes desensitized and the negative thought spirals can stop. You also build resilience and a sense of mastery that enables you to get back to living your life again. Fear is a critical human emotion, and your body’s fear response will always be there. ERP just reteaches your brain to respond only when there is an actual threat.