Certain situations stress us out, bring us to tears, or make our blood boil with rage. Usually, it’s perfectly clear why we’ve reacted that way. But what about those occasions where some of us experience such an utterly overwhelming sense of panic that it genuinely feels like we might die? That, according to Joshua Fletcher, psychotherapist and author of Anxiety: Panicking About Panic (CreateSpace, £8.99), is all down to our nervous system. ‘There are two sides to our nervous system: the sympathetic nervous system, which makes us feel on edge and stressed, and engages our ight-or-light stress response; and the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms the sympathetic system,’ he explains. ‘The parasympathetic nervous system is activated when you rest, do something that you enjoy, eat well, or meditate.’ In short, when you panic, the sympathetic takes over.
IT’S NOT SUDDEN
A panic attack is an overreaction; we’re behaving like we would if our lives were genuinely in jeopardy, when in fact we’re just doing something completely normal like standing in a supermarket (more on this later). ‘A lot of people are rushed of their feet and either don’t know how to stop, or are too scared to. They think they should be doing a hundred things at once,’ says Fletcher. ‘If you’re constantly activating the sympathetic nervous system, and haven’t activated your parasympathetic nervous system to balance things out, that triggers a disproportionate amount of adrenaline to be dumped. People say it comes out of nowhere, but actually it’s been building up.’