THE FUSE

When we think of anxiety and panic, we often see these common issues as affecting the mind, but they have a significant and distressing effect on the body as well. While it is certainly true that panic causes the mind to race, thoughts to be intrusive and unhelpful, and leads to anxious fixation on cognitions, panic is much more than just an experience of the mind. If we view panic as a “whole-body” phenomenon, we can understand the ways it affects virtually every physical system, from the nervous to the skeletal and everything in between. In fact, panic attacks can be diagnostically categorized into four distinct physical subtypes: vestibular (affecting the head and brain), cardiac (affecting the chest and heart), respiratory (affecting the lungs and breath), and gastrointestinal (affecting the digestive system and gastrointestinal tract).