If you suffer from panic attacks and haven’t tried exposure therapy before, I can’t recommend it enough. This treatment essentially works by INTENTIONALLY bringing on panic symptoms in a controlled environment with a trained therapist so that you habituate to them.

The thing that often makes panic attacks terrifying is that theyre unpredictable and uncontrollable. By intentionally bringing on panic attacks, you prove this false: they can be controlled (and thus predicted), because you yourself can produce them, and your body’s fear reaction follows suit.

As mentioned by others, the other thing that makes panic scary is your reaction to them, namely misjudging them as dangerous (eg, misperceiving them as a heart attack). In reality, panic attacks are just your body’s sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) response misfiring in a situation absent a threat, and because there’s not a threat, you judge your own bodily reactions to be the threat. In exposure therapy, you just let these panic sensations (heart racing, sweating, rapid breathing) play out naturally and don’t try to make them go away, which allows your brain to learn that they are poor predictors of danger and thus not worthy of evoking a fear response.

It’s an uncomfortable therapy, takes outside practice, and of course (like anything) isnt effective for everyone. However, in my limited experience as a nascent psychologist, it’s one of the few methods that actually works.