Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Panic may be a CO2 loop
The hypothesis comes from Justin Feinstein, who studies anxiety and fear-based disorders and has looked at the breathing habits of people with asthma, panic, and anxiety. They look alike: low CO2 tolerance and constant over-breathing. A person who habitually over-breathes has very little tolerance, so the moment breath is held, the brain sets off alarm bells.
That triggers a panic attack. The person breathes more, and more breathing constricts the throat, which feeds the attack. If that loop is the cause, slower breathing reverses it, because it slowly, very gradually builds CO2 in the body and lets the blood vessels open and relax. The data supporting the idea is coming in, though it remains a hypothesis for now.
How does carbon dioxide trigger panic?
In a 2013 Nature Neuroscience study led by Justin Feinstein, three women with damage to the amygdala, a brain region central to fear, were nearly fearless in everyday life. When they inhaled air containing 35 percent CO2, all three had panic attacks. The result suggested that the panic response to CO2 does not need the amygdala's usual fear circuitry. Normal air contains about 0.04 percent CO2.
Why does over-breathing cause tingling and dizziness?
Breathing out too much CO2 makes the blood more alkaline, which lowers the free calcium in it and makes nerves more excitable. That produces tingling in the lips and fingers and sometimes muscle cramps. The same drop in CO2 narrows blood vessels in the brain, and that can cause lightheadedness. Physiologists call the state respiratory alkalosis.
What is the suffocation false alarm theory?
The psychiatrist Donald Klein proposed in 1993 that the brain has a suffocation alarm that monitors CO2 and can fire when no danger exists. The idea came from observations that people with panic disorder are unusually sensitive to CO2. In laboratory studies, a higher share of people with panic disorder than healthy volunteers panic after inhaling CO2-enriched air.
More from The Rich Roll Podcast
