Therapy for panic attacks in Glasgow

What panic looks like

A panic attack is a sudden surge of intense fear that peaks within minutes. Panic disorder is what develops when the attacks keep coming, or when the fear of having one starts to shape your life. You may recognise some of these:

• Your heart pounds or skips, and you are sure something is wrong with it
• You cannot get a full breath, or you feel you are choking
• You feel dizzy, unreal or detached, as if you are watching yourself
• You are convinced you are about to faint, lose control, or die
• You avoid places you cannot leave quickly: trains, queues, cinemas, motorways, crowds
• You carry water, medication or your phone as insurance, or will not go anywhere without a particular person
• You scan your body for the first sign of an attack, and the scanning itself sets one off

Why it keeps going

Panic runs on a misreading. A normal bodily sensation, a skipped heartbeat, a wave of heat, a moment of light-headedness, gets interpreted as the start of something catastrophic. That interpretation triggers adrenaline, which produces more sensations, which seem to confirm the catastrophe. The loop can run from calm to full panic in under a minute.

What keeps it going afterwards is avoidance and safety behaviours. If you left the supermarket and the panic passed, the lesson your brain stores is that leaving saved you. If you sat by the exit, held someone’s arm or breathed in a particular way and nothing terrible happened, those become things you must do. Each one prevents you from finding out that the attack would have peaked and passed on its own, with no harm done.

How we treat it

Cognitive behavioural therapy is the treatment NICE recommends for panic disorder, and it has one of the strongest track records of any psychological treatment. It is practical, focused and usually brief. The work typically involves:

1. Making sense of the attack: tracing your own panic cycle, sensation by sensation, so it stops being a mystery.
2. Learning what the body is doing: why adrenaline produces exactly these feelings, and why they cannot hurt you.
3. Interoceptive exposure: deliberately bringing on the sensations in the session, in a graded way, until they stop signalling danger.
4. Dropping safety behaviours: leaving the water bottle at home, sitting away from the exit, letting an attack run its course without fighting it.
5. Going back to the places you avoid: planned, stepwise, and at a pace you set, until your world is your own size again.

Where panic began after a frightening event, such as a medical emergency, an assault or a serious accident, EMDR can help process the memory that the body is still reacting to. Your psychologist will discuss this with you if it seems relevant.

What to expect

Sessions last 50 minutes and how often you meet is agreed between you and your psychologist. A course for panic disorder is usually between 8 and 12 sessions. Between sessions you will practise what you did in the room, first the sensation exercises, then the real-world steps. Most people notice the attacks losing their grip well before the course ends.

If your fear is specifically about illness rather than the attack itself, our page on health anxiety may describe you better. If the worry is broad and constant rather than sudden, see generalised anxiety.

Who you might work with

Dr Adele Mackintosh is a clinical psychologist who works with anxiety, panic and phobias using CBT, ACT and compassion-focused therapy.

Dr Kevin Murray is a clinical psychologist who works with phobias, OCD and trauma using CBT, ACT and EMDR.

Dr Humera Millar is a clinical psychologist working with anxiety and phobias through CBT, ACT and schema therapy.

View our full team to find a psychologist who feels right for you, or tell us what is going on and we will suggest someone.