When people feel panic feelings or have a full blown panic attack they are often referring to symptoms such as sweating, heart pounding, stammering or shaking, blood rushing into their face and head making them light headed, their head feel as if it is spinning, they fear they are going to have a heart attack or collapse in public, and the only thought in their head is “get me out of here.”

Common examples of panic situations that I have met as a Hypnotherapist: A woman is standing in a queue and starts feeling claustrophobic and feels she is going to pass out!

An executive officer can feel three authority figures staring at her waiting for answers and can feel her breathing stopping and she fears she is going to have a heart attack!

A man sits at a restaurant and starts feeling “not good enough” but feels stuck in the situation; he is sweating, stammering and feeling he’s going to sick any moment and crumble in panic; no one knows his inner feelings as he is looking very quiet on the surface!

Panic feelings are horrible to feel!

But they can be created very quickly by us human beings because after the first sensations of panic we go into a self-fulfilling mode where we start predicting ourselves near a panic attack every time our heartbeats quicken or our breath becomes laboured.

Before we could be in the same situation e.g. run after a train and get out of breath, stand into a crowded space and feeling the lack of air, having an authority figure stand over us and blush but still maintain control of our thoughts, sit in a restaurant with a girl and feel the heartbeats quicken but once a person has experienced panic attack or panic feelings at its extreme the tendency to read an oncoming panic attack into every heightened sensation in the body becomes the habit.

What we need to understand is that the right brain often called the unconscious brain in hypnosis is very suggestible and imaginary and it responds to our sensations more than to our logic. So when our heartbeats is quickening because we are excited and we imagine ourselves happy ( on a swing, merry-go-round, tower building, on an airplane) the unconscious brain gets calmer and lets us enjoy because we have interpreted the same heartbeats, blood rush in our body and light headedness as “excited”, “happy” etc… but after a panic attack when the same person has become very sensitively attuned to listening and watching every single change into his/her body metabolism, every quick heartbeat, every heavy breath, every blood rush is read as “oh my god, am I getting a panic attack!”

This alarmed message will send images of panic, attacks, strokes, sickness in public, embarrassing scenes to the imagination and the right brain will react with the “flight or fight” response; so basically you have interpreted for your unconscious brain that you are in danger and it set the body and mind into a protective mechanism of shutting off the logic and getting the body to run and hide, save itself from danger.

Being evolved human beings we do not physically run but we can feel how our whole system gets into a mode of running and the more it is running physiologically the more the person is reading panic attacks and it just sets off a vicious circle where the mind and body gets into a hypnotic state of alarm and defence.

In hypnotherapy clients often come for this “fear of the fear”: for whatever reason they had their first extreme panic feeling or attacks e.g. loss of control, fear of heights, fear of being trapped in a meeting, fear of being in closed spaces etc… thereafter they just constantly are hooked to their body reactions, they are constantly listening to their heartbeats, blood flow, breathing, skin responses as if waiting, pre-empting and predicting a second or consecutive panic attacks.

The most common symptoms of a panic attack are

•	Racing heartbeat
•	Difficult breathing/panting
•	Fear of dying
•	Chest pains
•	Blurry vision
•	Ringing in ears
•	Dizziness/nausea
•	Profuse sweating

Clients often are coming to Hypnotherapy with additional symptoms of insomnias, sleeplessness because they are worrying about panicking the next day, blushing, social phobias, fear of becoming sick, fear of losing control, low self-esteem etc… a hypnotherapist will not see a client with panic attacks without asking them to have a check up with their doctor or local hospital first if they have had a full-blown panic attacks.

Panic attack versus panic disorder

A panic disorder is diagnosed when a person has had four or more panic attacks in one month or one panic attack followed by a month of fear of having another attack. Panic disorder is the next step up from panic attacks and it is usually known that it takes longer for a person to recover once he/she is diagnosed as having panic disorder.

Panic disorder is often accompanied by other symptoms along with the above e.g. depression and may lead to phobias developing to situations where panic attacks have occurred.

A Hypnotherapist works with the Doctor's diagnosis in cases of panic attacks. After the first panic attack the client usually experiences what we term as Panic Escalation which shows four phases:

1.	The client makes unrealistic self-statements that keep them in state of constant alarm and their body become tense due to the fight or flight response.

2.	The client begins to fear the fear itself;as their nerves and bodies become more sensitized they begin to anticipate the panic attack.

3.	The client begins to reject their own rational feelings and thoughts as their fear escalates.

4.	The client will begin to avoid any situation where they perceive they may experience feelings of panic. If they do enter an avoided situation then a panic attack occurs.

Hypnotherapy helps with panic feelings and panic attacks

The mind is a very powerful thing and it can be tuned, programmed to receive suggestions quite easily, though still maintaining control and understanding. The mind controls all of our thoughts - good and bad - but can sometimes be tricked into believing things that are "not quite right" which then signals other parts of the body to react accordingly which is exactly what happens in panic attacks.

Through hypnotherapy the aim is to relax the conscious mind to such an extent that we can feed the unconscious mind with healthier ways of coping with stress situations, their breathing process and the fears. Through visualisation in a trance state the daunting images the client consciously carries of having another attack and dying are replaced with feelings of control; in the relaxed state when the client looks upon the symptoms he/she feels in charge of the body's response and regain his sense of power over his/her body and mind.

Hypnosis help their unconscious mind regain the safety and trust that the world is worth exploring; we all know it logically but the logic only works for the left brain and when the unconscious brain goes into alarm and creates phobias (spiders, heights, closed spaces, presentations) the logic fails and the client finds that he/she is saying “come on relax!” but the body is responding hypnotically to the right brain’s fear and not the logic of the left brain!

Hypnosis is a state of mind where the unconscious brain is more powerful and this happens constructively for all of us when on a beach, driving, dancing or listening to music; in a destructive mode we are gone into that emotional world and is responding form there when worrying, panicking, and responding in a symptomatic way.

In summary I have found that an average of four-six sessions are all we need to help clients with panic feelings that have become dysfunctional (affecting their sleep, social outings, work concentration, creating stress in relationships) or clients who have had one or two panic attacks and are under medications but they have been referred by their G.P. for “relaxation” or “managing the panic”. But for some clients sessions can go up to eight/ten because they have been suffering from panic attacks or if not then from worrying tendencies, depression, or anxiety for so long that they take longer to respond to hypnosis; often there is a part of the brain that sabotage their efforts because of the conditioned habit of being a person “with panic attacks” for so long so how can they change?

But sooner or later every client responds well to hypnotherapy because for one simple reason: they are already under a hypnotic trance with their symptoms; they agree they have an inner worrying voice that predicts and then triggers the panic even if logically they do not that to happen!

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