The Difference Between Anxiety and Panic Attacks

Many people experience anxiety, and many people experience panic attacks, but they are not inherently the same thing. It’s important to have an understanding of the differences between the two in order to tailor the treatment of your anxiety to how you specifically experience anxiety (whether that includes struggling with anxiety, panic attacks, or a mix of the two).

So let’s dive into the differences between anxiety and panic attacks, and how they show up in the body!

ANXIETY:

We know that anxiety is an incredibly common (and incredibly debilitating) struggle, but what is anxiety specifically? Anxiety is defined as a general feeling of worry or uneasiness about a broad range of things. More specifically, let’s look at how anxiety is defined according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - the DSM, which is what therapists use to diagnose mental health conditions. 

According to the DSM, the symptoms of anxiety include: 

• Experiencing excessive anxiety and worry

• Having difficulty controlling your worry 

• Feeling restless or “on-edge” 

• Being easily fatigued

• Having difficulty concentrating on things, or experiencing your “mind going blank”

• Feeling more irritable than usual

• Experiencing muscle tension 

• Experiencing sleep disturbances

Looking at this list of symptoms, if you experience at least three of these symptoms on most days (most meaning more than half the days of the week) for at least 6 months consistently, it indicates that you’re experiencing a condition called Generalized Anxiety Disorder

(But even if you don’t meet the criteria for an “official” diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, all of those symptoms we just looked at are the multitude of ways that anxiety might be showing up in your life and your body).

Although these symptoms aren’t super fun, the truth is that anxiety is a normal and natural emotion that all of us will experience at some point throughout our lives. 

Now let’s look at what’s different about panic attacks.

PANIC ATTACKS:

Experiencing a panic attack is not the same thing as experiencing anxiety. In fact, you can experience anxiety without ever experiencing a panic attack, but if you have experienced a panic attack before then you know how truly terrifying and debilitating they can be. 

According to the DSM again, a panic attack is defined as “an abrupt surge of intense fear or intense discomfort that reaches a peak within minutes, and during which times you experience at least four of the following symptoms”:

• Heart palpitations, pounding heart or rapid heart rate

• Sweating

• Trembling or shaking

• Having difficulty breathing 

• Chest pain or discomfort

• Feeling dizzy, light-headed or like you’re going to faint

• Feeling of choking

• Numbness or tingling in your body 

• Chills or hot flashes

• Nausea or abdominal distress 

• Feeling detached from yourself or from what’s going on around you 

• Fear of losing control

• Fear that you’re “going crazy”

• Fear of dying

So, a panic attack is essentially a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reactions (in essence, the fight or flight response) when there is usually no real danger or apparent cause. 

One of the main reasons it’s important to understand the difference between panic attacks and anxiety is so that you know how to better treat each of them. General anxiety, because it is both cognitive and physical in nature, benefits from both a cognitive approach (challenging the origins and beliefs of anxiety) and a physical approach (learning to regulate your nervous system). You can learn more about the two avenues to treating anxiety in this blog post.

Panic attacks, on the other hand, because of their intensely physical nature benefit primarily from a physical approach to treatment that focuses on learning how to de-activate the sympathetic nervous system.

I hope this helped you make sense of the differences between experiencing anxiety in general and experiencing panic attacks!

References: American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.).