Panic Disorder: How to Fight Back and Win describes how to diagnose and treat panic disorder using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  It was written by psychiatrist Lindsay Kiriakos, MD, who was trained at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and has taught as a clinical instructor at the UCLA Anxiety Disorders Clinic.  The book describes how to do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Panic Disorder in a step-by-step manner both with and without medications.

What Are Panic Attacks? 

Panic attacks are unexpected sudden episodes of intense physical symptoms accompanied by the fear of dying, losing control, and/or going crazy.  Panic attacks often come out of the blue; however, about 25% of my patient report having their first panic attack after using drugs. 

One of the cardinal features of panic disorder is that it will eventually cause you to become hyper-vigilant to your body (i.e. you start to notice every blip and change in your physical sensations and you start to constantly monitor your body).  This becomes a problem because once you notice a psychical sensation, it causes anxiety, which makes the symptoms worst... and so and so forth until you eventually triggered the “fight or flight” response (which is experienced as a ”panic attack”).  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy decreases this hyper-vigilance and short-circuits the cycle of anxiety that can lead to panic attacks.

What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a collection of techniques that are effective for anxiety.  The main techniques used by cognitive behavioral therapy are relaxation training, thought restructuring, and exposures.  Relaxation training refers to a variety of techniques that can be used to calm yourself in the moment.  Thought restructuring a type of journaling where you practice talking back to anxious thoughts using a specific logical formula.  Exposures refer to a variety of ways of gently desensitizing you to specific physical sensations and situations so that you are no longer hyper-vigilant and no longer need to avoid situations because of anxiety. 

In clinical trials, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works approximately 80% of the time for Panic Disorder.  It is the first-line treatment recommended by the American Psychiatric Association for Panic Disorder.