Dr. Don Wood explains why panic attacks feel random: unconscious memories can activate your nervous system for an hour before you notice, building toward panic. A study of 13 people showed nervous-system activation happening long before the attack itself.
Questions this video answers
Southern Methodist University
2,000 hours
13 people
They all reported that the panic attack 'came on instantly.'
Chapters
My panic attacks feel like they come out of nowhere. You know, that's really common. I hear that all the time. People say to me, the panic attack came on instantly. However, that's not true. Would you be surprised to know that a panic attack could start up to an hour before you're just not consciously aware of it? Something's happening below your conscious awareness that you're not aware of. So where it's actually coming from in most cases is memory. So if you see this loop up here, the high definition memory, is going to continue to loop. And what that does is it creates a physiological and a psychological loop that will activate the central nervous system. Then the central nervous system is going to go into a fight or flight response. How does it get you into a fight or flight response? It uses an emotion. The purpose of the emotion is to call for an action. What does your mind want to be done? It's nervous, it's scared because it's looking at old data in real time. And it continues on this loop, which is then going to show up. As people say, I have panic attacks. Panic attacks is a combination psychological and physical. So there was a study done at a Southern Methodist university that had 2,000 hours of data on panic attacks. They had 13 people experience a panic attack during the study. All 13 people said exactly what you just said. The panic attack came out of nowhere. However, they had these people all monitored. They were checking all their vitals during that study. What they discovered is a lot of these people were having activations of their nervous system before the panic attack, up to an hour before. They felt like. All 13 people in the study said the panic attack came on instantly. Not true. So the key is to get to the cause, the root cause of the panic attack, which is coming in from the memory of looping, activating the nervous system, which creates an emotion, which is a call for an action. And the mind then goes into a panic because it can't find what the action is, because there is no reason for an action. And there it is.
