Fight or Flight response explained II

So you can probably start to see the difficulty with the situation that you are now faced with.  Every time your heart rate increases, or you feel a little lightheaded, your amygdala wakes up and senses "danger" and does the only thing it knows how to do to protect you: initiate the fight-or-flight response.  Giving you the exact same feelings that you have come to dread and hate.  And not only that, every time you are in that same restaurant, maybe at around the same time or with the same people -  if your amygdala decides that this situation seems an awful lot like that one other time where there was danger, it will press the ON button and initiate the fight-or-flight response.  You will probably leave the restaurant (after all, your mind is telling you to run away) and eventually the response will go away.  Then your amygdala will think, okay good I survived that dangerous situation.  And then it will catalog all of the new information about that experience.  What you were wearing, what you were thinking, what you ordered.

You know how it seems like you have panic attacks completely out of the blue?  I tend to think that that isn't exactly true.  Example: maybe you have a panic attack while you are at home eating some cheerios wearing a red shirt and thinking about the ninja turtles.  Cheerios, red shirt and ninja turtles are now cataloged as "dangerous".  So now lets say you are at a grocery store and you happen to be wearing that same shirt.  And then you walk past the cheerios in aisle 5 and the box is advertising a free ninja turtle action figure with every purchase.  Your amygdala recognizes cheerios + red shirt + ninja turtles = danger and presses the ON button.  To you, it feels like you are having a panic attack for no reason at a grocery store.  But actually it is your amygdala working incredibly hard to protect you from what it believes to be dangerous. 

So the amygdala starts to gather this enormous amount of material that it thinks is dangerous.  I mean seriously it is probably an unbelievable amount of material, especially if you have had panic attacks for a while now.  To the point where yes, the attacks do seem unpredictable because you can't possibly remember every detail about every situation in which you had a panic attack.

But armed with all of this knowledge, this understanding of what is actually going on - you can start to do something about it.