Knowing the exact causes of panic attacks is no easy task. Your mind holds many secrets. And foremost among those secrets that it doesn’t seem it wants to reveal — at least very easily — is its fundamental workings. How does the human mind function? If the medical community actually knew what happened during a panic attack, then research could begin to help change whatever chain of events leads you down that very slick and slippery slope of a panic attack.
So the precise cause or causes of a panic attack remain pretty much a mystery to even the brightest minds of the medical and research communities. But that doesn’t mean theories as to the cause of this disorder haven’t been offered up. Because they have.
Psychological Causes of Panic Attacks
One theory is that one event — a major "stressor" may occur in your life, which kicks in and triggers your first episode.
Or, in some cases, physicians have noted it may be a series of stressors that trigger the disorder within you. And certainly we’re talking stress as in the death of a family member.
Other traumatic stressors that could kick off your first panic attack include being involved in an accident, either witnessing or being the victim of a violent crime, experiencing a major illness or even undergoing some type of childhood trauma or abuse.
Or other experts claim being in the midst of a natural disaster of gigantic proportions may also trigger your first episode.
Normally, we consider stress to be something "bad" happening to us. But stress — medically speaking — is not only about bad things happening to us. Stress can just as easily take the form of a joyous or pleasant event.
Few people, for example, would consider getting married a "bad" thing (Now I don’t want to hear one comment from people who have been married and divorced several times over).
Yet the actual planning for the wedding (as well as the day itself) can be incredibly stressful.
Having a baby is a stressor – in several ways, in fact. Nobody denies the supremely joyous aspect of having a baby. But even that job places a physical stress on your system if you’re the woman who is expecting.
And along with this joyous event, you are also experiencing additional financial pressure. The stresses multiply.
Even though landing that new job is an answer to your prayers, the anticipation and actual starting of it are anxiety-filled.
Physical Causes of Panic Attacks
Now all this talk of stress and triggers of your stress are psychological theories. There is another school of thought that believes that a panic attack’s root cause is purely physical. One of these theories suspects that a panic attack originates when an alarm is falsely activated in the locus ceruleus of the brain.
This is the area where the majority of adrenergic — or adrenaline-like — neurons reside. These axons, which are just a part of the nerve cell conducting nerve impulses away from the cell body, are connected to other areas of the brain as well as the thalamus and the hypothalamus.
You’re basically experiencing a noradrenergic overload when this false alarm goes off. You’re body is flooded with adrenaline, which is actually the substance that creates the panic attacks symptom of "fight or flight" response.
This response was essential to early human beings, whose very lives depended on listening to this system — and then using the hormones and other substances it pumped through the bloodstream for energy to either fight the aggressor (or stressor) or run for the hills (or caves!)
Now imagine that alarm system malfunctioning — for no apparent reason. That’s the panic attack. Your system mistakenly thought it saw something that could potentially cause you harm.
In this explanation, the causes of panic attacks are attributed to chemical imbalances in the nervous system. That’s why many physicians prescribe a variety of medications, including antidepressants. In about half of these instances, statistics show use of antidepressants for a year actually lead to a panic attack-free life.