Anxiety can be crippling. All of us deal with varying levels of stress — it's an evolutionary trait that helped us remain cognizant of the world's potential dangers. Given that we now have few of the survival concerns of our ancestors, however, we've taken anxiety to an entirely new level.
I've been hospitalized twice for panic attacks: my first at 16, when I was certain I was having a heart attack, and again 12 years later, when I had the same feeling. Every time you have a full-blown episode, you're certain a heart attack is occurring, even though you know better. When your flight-or-fight system is activated, logic has no say.
While we all have different emotional triggers, the chemistry is the same: your amygdala alarms your hypothalamus and sympathetic nervous system something's gone awry; a flood of adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine respond to the hypothalamus's distress signal; your heart jumps into your throat, you fingertips tingle and sweat, your thoughts assault you; in a chain reaction that solidifies the connection of the trigger to the attack, your amygdala demands that your hippocampus stores the event for future recall.