What is Panic?

“Blind Panic as God Appears” by chantrybee is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Contents

Panic

Panic is the body’s built‑in alarm system going off at full volume. It’s what happens when your brain decides you’re in serious danger, whether the danger is real or not, and throws your whole system into emergency mode.

What panic feels like

In a panic attack, this alarm switches on suddenly and intensely. Common signs include:

Racing or pounding heart, tight chest, shortness of breath
Sweating, shaking, dizziness, feeling faint or sick
Feeling out of your body or like things aren’t real
A powerful sense of doom: “I’m going to die / go crazy / lose control”
An uncontrollable desire to act on a panic response impulse

Nothing “mystical” is happening here. The brain’s fear centres (especially the amygdala) flip the fight–flight–freeze system on, based on a trigger that might not been recognised. Adrenaline surges, breathing changes, blood flow shifts to big muscles, and your thinking narrows to pure survival. Your body can automatically see threats that you might not be able to, but also, it can learn to overreact to threats that are no longer valid.

The main survival responses

When the alarm goes off, there are a few automatic strategies:

Fight – anger, lashing out, arguing, trying to control everything.
Flight – escaping: leaving the room, avoiding places, shutting down contact.
Freeze – going still or numb: mind goes blank, body feels stuck, speech dries up.

All three can show up in panic. Freeze is especially common when you feel trapped, overpowered, or unable to see any safe way out.

Stockholm syndrome as a “second freeze”

Stockholm syndrome is a term used when a victim under extreme, ongoing threat (for example, a hostage or abuse victim) starts to feel loyalty or affection towards the person harming them. In plain nervous‑system terms, this can be understood as an extreme freeze‑and‑submit strategy:

The person is too trapped to fight and too controlled to flee.
Their brain looks for any way to reduce danger, so it shifts into deep appeasement: “If I attach to this person, agree with them and see them as protector, maybe I’ll be safer.”
Sometimes, people in a family, or other situation, can respond to ongoing trauma that they cannot easily get out of, by moving into appeasement, and sometimes, enforcement

This is not a conscious choice or “weakness”. It’s a survival pattern: the mind reorganises around the threat to keep you alive. You could see it as a second‑level freeze – not just the body going still, but the personality partially reshaping itself to fit the captor or abuser’s world, so the threat feels less overwhelming.

Working with panic

Useful starting points:

Learn to name it: “This is panic, this is my alarm system, not a heart attack or madness.”
Use grounding: slow breathing, feeling your feet, naming what you can see/hear/touch.
Gradually retrain the trigger (often with therapy): gently facing feared situations, updating the brain that they are survivable and do not need a full emergency response.

In short: panic is your emergency system firing hard; freeze is one survival option; and Stockholm‑type responses are a more extreme, long‑term version of freeze/appease when escape or resistance doesn’t feel possible.

There is also a strong link between triggers and panic, especially panic attacks.

How triggers and panic connect

A trigger is anything (inside or outside you) that your brain has learned to link with danger: a place, a bodily feeling, a smell, a thought, or a situation. When that trigger appears, your threat system (amygdala, fight–flight–freeze response) can switch on very fast, sometimes before you’re fully aware of it.

For people who have had panic attacks before, the brain can start to treat certain bodily sensations (like a racing heart or dizziness) or situations (crowds, driving, being far from home) as triggers. Those triggers then cue the same alarm response as the original attack, creating a loop:

Trigger (external situation or internal sensation).
Fast threat signal (“I’m in danger”).
Panic symptoms (heart racing, breath changes, dizziness, fear of losing control).
Fear of the symptoms themselves, which then becomes an extra trigger next time.

So: not all triggers cause panic, and not all panic is clearly triggered (some attacks feel “out of the blue”), but in many cases panic attacks are the body’s reaction to a trigger the system has learned to treat as dangerous, even when you are not in real danger anymore.