This Is The Cause Of Panic

If a pilot is flying as a passenger, he or she can easily keep up with what is going on. Some passengers can process everything that is happening, but most find takeoff and turbulence overwhelming.

In addition to what other passengers must process, anxious passengers must process what they imagine is happening. Like a computer with too many programs open, their high-level thinking freezes up.

When high-level thinking freezes up, the difference between what is real and what is imaginary vanishes. The mere thought that the plane might fall is transformed into an experience of the plane plunging.

There is a name for this phenomenon. It is called psychic equivalence. Psychic equivalence is the powerful dynamic that turns anxiety into fear and fear into terror.

To understand psychic equivalence is to understand fear of flying.

Psyche means the mind. Equivalent means two things are the same. Psychic equivalence is a state of mind in which a person experiences no difference between what they imagine and what they perceive, which is to say, they experience no difference between what is imaginary and what is real.

Children are in a state of psychic equivalence until around age 3. They then make an amazing discovery. They realize that something in their mind does not exist outside their mind.

When a child realizes this, the magical world of pretend becomes available to them. They are free to make things up. Anything can exist in their mind if they just want it to. It’s fun to play with another child who will put the same thing in their mind.

Think of a four-year-old and a two-year-old playing together. The older child says, “Let’s pretend we are in the jungle. There are lions and tigers. They are going to try to catch us and eat us. Look. There’s one! He’s after us! Run! Look out. He’s almost got you!”

The older child knows the lions and tigers are pretend. He is aware he ”made them up.” The younger child also made the animals up. But as yet unaware of his mental processes, he does not know he made them up. To him, they are real. Terrified, he runs to his mother to keep him from being eaten.

What allows an older child to know the lions and tigers in his mind are made up? Psychological theorist Peter Fonagy calls it reflective function. Reflective function allows us to observe our own mental processes, and to sense which mode - perceiving, remembering, or imagining - we are using. Reflective function senses a difference between what comes into awareness from our physical eye versus what comes into awareness from the mind’s eye.

When high-level thinking becomes overwhelmed, reflective function pauses. When it pauses, we sense no difference between memory, imagination and perception.

The onset of psychic equivalence is insidious. When we have no way to reflect on our own mental processes, we have no way to know we are not reflecting on our own mental processes. Said another way, when we are in psychic equivalence, we have no way to know we are in psychic equivalence.

If the reflective function is weak, it can pause well before high-level thinking freezes up. Reflective function pauses more easily in some of us than in others. How easily it pauses depends on three things. First, how well-developed it is. Fonagy says well-developed reflective function is “a hard-won personal achievement.” Second, how much stress hormone is being released. High levels can pause reflective function. Third, how effectively the parasympathetic nervous system protects reflective function by counteracting the effects of stress hormones.

If you are a person who goes into psychic equivalence easily (though you do not know how easily you do because you don’t know you are in it when you are in it), thinking about an upcoming flight may trigger stress hormones, cause psychic equivalence, and make an imagined plane crash seem real. This can lead you to believe your plane will crash. Some anxious fliers say, “I just know that if I get on that plane, it will crash.” If they cancel their flight plans, stop triggering stress hormones, come out of psychic equivalence, and expect the plane they were sure would crash to arrive safely.

Something similar happens when an anxious flier drops a friend off at the airport. The anxious flier expects their friend to arrive safely. But if they were to consider getting on the plane with their friend, they would then expect the plane to crash.

Understanding psychic equivalence can help some anxious fliers avoid going into it. It can help others look back at their flights and realize they were not in the danger they believed they were.

Psychic Equivalence Transforms Hyper-Arousal Into Panic

But consider what makes psychic equivalence such a problem. Psychic equivalence, by causing terror, transforms hyper-arousal into panic.

If we look at hyper-arousal as a stand-alone issue, what is so bad about it? So what if one’s heart rate is 140? A person doing an aerobic workout wants their heart rate at or above that level. So what if there is tension in the body? Every athletic endeavor strains the body.

The problem is this: psychic equivalence turns what a person imagines into their reality. For example, an elevated heart rate leads a person to think they might be having a heart attack. The thought triggers the release of stress hormones. The stress hormones pause their reflective function. Psychic equivalence. What started as a thought is now a fact. The person “knows” they are having a heart attack. They “know” they are about to die. The thought of a heart attack has been transformed by psychic equivalence into certainty that a heart attack is taking place.

By understanding that psychic equivalence can cause imagination to be experienced as reality, we can understand how arousal, if it triggers psychic equivalence, can cause terror, and thus panic.

Difficult breathing, in a state of psychic equivalence, becomes suffocation. Overwhelm, in a state of psychic equivalence, is losing one’s mind.

Some therapists tell panic sufferers that they should not fear panic because panic will do them no harm. If panic were nothing more than hyper-arousal, that might be true. But when hyper-arousal leads to psychic equivalence, the terror of dying, going out of control, or losing one’s mind traumatizes. Realizing the terror was due to psychic equivalence does not resolve the trauma.

We now know that the key to stopping panic is preventing psychic equivalence. The sympathetic nervous system increases arousal. The parasympathetic nervous system decreases arousal. These two systems are supposed to interact and regulate arousal as needed. But trauma distorts the sympathetic-parasympathetic interaction. Hyper-arousal happens too easily.

When hyper-arousal takes place, reflective function stops separating memory and imagination from perception. Everything a person is aware of seems to be perception, whether it is perception or not.

Panic can be prevented by stopping psychic equivalence. Techniques in the SOAR programs achieve that.