A woman quits her secretarial job because part of it entails a Monday meeting in which she has to sit in a small room with a handful of people. Within ten minutes, her palms would be sweating, her heart would be pounding, and she would feel so uncomfortable that she couldn’t stand it, and have to leave the room.

Why? Well, as a teenager, she’d had a bit of loud flatulence in the classroom one day. The entire class had laughed, and each successive day after that had teased her about the event until she was so scared of it happening again that she dropped out of school. Once she got into a work situation, that old terror re-asserted itself whenever she was in an enclosed room with a lot of people. She was having an anxiety disorder panic attack.

However, she was an adult now, and knew what was causing these panic attacks, and was able to train herself to get over them, with a bit of cognitive behavior therapy.

A delivery driver takes the long route to and from work because the short route has a railroad track running over an overpass, and a stop sign situated in such a way that occasionally he would have to stop underneath the overpass with the train running over him. The first time this happened, he grew more nervous and uncomfortable as time went on, until he reached the point where he was almost ready to jump out of the car and run out of the tunnel, but fortunately at that point the train passed by. He was having an anxiety disorder panic attack

Several months passed before he finally figured out why that experience had terrified him so. He’d been a combat Marine in Vietnam and the sound of the train rattling over the tracks, and the vibrations and so on, had transported him back to that time period, and the anxieties of combat. Once he figured that, he was able to use that route without fear.

In other words, many people who suffer from panic attacks can solve the problem once they figure out what is triggering their attacks, and why. It all comes down to the old adage, “know thyself.”