Panic attacks are the initial steps leading up to panic disorder and a good number of people are affected by this problem. It is estimated that 2% of all American adults will experience at least one panic attack. Anxiety causes panic attacks and they are often confused with each other, but where anxiety is somewhat gently simmering, panic attacks are sudden, violent, and temporarily disable the victim of doing anything, especially coping with them. There is a wide range of factors that causes panic attacks and they are so random that it is impossible to establish a cause-and-effect relationship, especially in light of the fact that panic attacks happen even when the victim is sleeping. Whatever causes panic attacks, the duration of one can be anywhere from half-an-hour to a whole day.

Initially, a particular situation that causes panic attacks need not be linked to them permanently. However, if left untreated, every panic attack acts as a reinforcement that gradually increases the phobia associated with whatever causes panic attacks. In such people, there is a deep urge to avoid those circumstances until finally the situation or circumstance is established in their minds as a direct cause of panic attacks. When faced with those situations, these people's anxiety will hit dangerous levels and they will, in a manner of speaking, be tricking themselves into having a panic attack. This vicious circle causes panic attacks repeatedly until the whole situation develops into a panic disorder that needs medical attention. To make things worse, once the process of associating fears with panic attacks is started, the patient will associated a greater and greater number of situations with panic attacks until their professional, personal, and social lives will begin to suffer because they will be trying hard to avoid being in any situation whatsoever.

Though panic attacks are unpredictable, they are still subject to control and treatment. Due to the confusing signals received during panic attacks they are often assumed to be a heart condition or some other kind of respiratory problem that requires medical attention. Since these patients are not rational during or immediately after a panic attack, it is often useless to tell them about what causes panic attacks and why they are not going to die from some serious physical problem. On the other hand, some patients might take a "no problem" statement literally and just consider panic attacks to be a temporary bad phase that requires no treatment. Care must be taken because though whatever causes panic attacks might not be physically threatening there are still psychological implications that are equally devastating.

The closest analogy to what happens during panic attacks is found in how the human body reacts to fear or a threat. There are established rules of behavior in our brain on what it must do when faced with sudden danger to the body or life. Fear causes panic attacks more than anything else though the nature of fear is not always clear. A panic attack is the body's response to a threat that is not really there. Under threatening circumstances, that very defense helps us to survive the threat, but when there is no threat the triggering of this defense mechanism causes panic attacks.