A panic attack is a sudden surge that peaks in minutes and recedes; an anxiety attack is a slower swell of worry that can hang on for hours or days. Only “panic attack” is a formal clinical term, but the distinction matters for one practical reason: the two respond to different treatment, and My Denver Therapy treats both.
Panic: the ambush
Panic arrives like weather — often without an obvious trigger, sometimes from sleep. It’s dominated by body symptoms: pounding heart, air hunger, dizziness, unreality, a conviction that something catastrophic is happening right now. Ten minutes later it’s receding and you’re exhausted, embarrassed, and afraid of the next one.
Anxiety: the siege
What people call an anxiety attack is usually worry reaching saturation: a bad week compounding into a state — tight chest, churning stomach, racing thoughts about real things (the job, the diagnosis, the kid). It builds, plateaus, and lingers. Less dramatic than panic, often more draining, because it doesn’t end in ten minutes.
Why the label changes the treatment
Panic treatment retrains a false alarm — the catastrophic misreading of body sensations and the avoidance that grows around attacks. That’s the work of our panic attack therapy. Sustained worry is a different machine: it calls for anxiety treatment, and when the worry runs on a loop that never resolves anything, our overthinking work targets the loop itself. Plenty of people have both; treatment just needs to know which it’s aiming at first.
Whichever one you’ve got, it has a treatment. Start with the free consult: (720) 504-4329 or write to us.
