Therapist Shari B. Kaplan explains that a panic attack is your fight-or-flight response firing at full speed, flooding your body with cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart races, blood pumps, and your mind spirals into fear about the fear itself, which makes it worse.
A panic attack means that your fight or flight response is coming on fast and furious. So there's gonna be a burst of stress hormones. Your body is going to have a reaction. So think about that running away from an animal, like your heart needs to be pumping more blood throughout your body. Cortisol is going to release into your bloodstream so you have more energy so that you're up for the run or the fight. So a panic attack is going to entail a lot of physiological experiences, which is why I think people start panicking about the panic. They feel their heart pounding and then they start getting frightened because their heart is pounding.
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