A great many of us are familiar with fear and stress. These are normal conditions in our lives and once we pass these troubles we tend to forget about them. Unfortunately there are persons who live with fear and panic their whole lives. For these people panic does not mean a reaction to a normal dangerous situation, instead it means wondering when you will be fearful and helpless next. This is what having panic disorder can do to you.

Panic disorder is a sad condition. The feelings arising from this disorder are irrational to the condition. They have a tendency to seem in response to stressful events in our lives. These may be events like getting married, having your first child, even changing your job. Panic disorders generally start from panic attacks. These can sometimes arrive during teenage years to early adulthood.

Panic attacks and their symptoms are connected with panic disorder. The symptoms can be from a fast beating heart, dizziness, nausea, paralyzing fear, smothering sensations to a terror of death. Sometimes panic disorder can lead to several phobias, substance abuse, medical complications and in severe cases, suicidal.

The sufferer of panic disorder will live in constant and persistent terror of future panic attacks reoccurring. The effect of living with panic disorder is that you tend to restrict your life in certain areas so that you avoid triggering another panic attack. While we may think that this behavior is weird, for the panic disorder individual this sort of lifestyle tends to be a nightmare.

The effects of panic disorder go from mild to being socially impaired to the more severe and debilitating situation of agoraphobia, where you are housebound for a big part of your life as you desire to avoid another panic attack. With panic disorder, phobias are usually the result. Here phobias do not start with regards to specific objects or events in one's life. Instead experiencing a panic attack in different locations or conditions will cause the phobia to manifest itself.

People who may have had four or more repeated panic attacks and who think that they might have another such bout of pure mind numbing panic should check with a psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety and panic disorders. This is very serious because the longer your situation is left untreated, the more the quality of your life will degrade.

Many therapists swear that the best ways to treat panic disorder is with cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy and in other cases a combination of these two along with prescription medication. These are all great methods to control your panic disorder, but these will remain only methods and not possible cures if you do not take the first step in seeing a trained psychiatrist as well as completing the course of treatment.