What is the fear of losing control?
In some people, the most out-standing fear is to lose control of their mind or to become crazy. This belief appears as a result of experiencing many rare sensations without a logical explanation, such as vision anomalies (blurry vision, seeing small lights, sensation of unreality), very intensive thoughts, or a strong escape feeling.
All these organic phenomena have one punctual explanation on the basis of the ANS activation as an adaptive response of the species.
The most worrying sensations are the ones related to visual fields, who make you perceive reality in a distorted way. (“as if I wasn’t myself”). When we suffer a strong anxiety response, our organism thinks we’re in a dangerous situation, we can be attacked by a predator and we have to decide in little time if we’re going to run away or fight. In order to see our enemy more clearly, our pupils dilate abnormally, which gives us a much greater view, but at the same time it can cause those visual peculiarities, due to the over-dilated pupil which isn’t used to the environmental light.
When a person thinks they’re about to lose their mind, they think “something will break” inside their brains, and from that moment onwards, they’ll become mentally ill or schizophrenic. Schizophrenia and all psychosis normally appear in early ages: adolescence and early adulthood. They don’t appear out of the blue, they follow a progressive worsening process, which the patient isn’t aware of, reaching deliriums and hallucinations, such as hearing and seeing things that don’t exist. Normally those patients have family history, and even though it isn’t totally clear, it is thought to be a genetic-based disorder.
In clinical psychology, there’s an important difference between emotional problems and psychotic disorders. We all suffer emotional problems to a greater or lesser extent, such as depression, phobias, panic or sexual problems. Psychotic problems are illnesses, and fortunately only suffered by a few people.
A psychotic disorder is NEVER a branch of an emotional problem. Psychosis isn’t the end of a phobia; emotional problems and psychosis have different origins and evolutions. They are similar paths, but they don’t overlap each other. The same way that having a cold could turn into a flu, but would never be cancer. This can be applied to psychology: anxiety problems like panic could get worse and become a more serious panic, but would never turn out into a psychosis.
Other people think that they will lose control temporarily and that they will behave violently, ridiculously or in an extravagant way and that this could even endanger other people or even themselves by shouting, or throwing themselves to the ground, break objects, attack others or jump out the window. These thoughts are strengthened by the decontrol sensation of a person suffering a panic attack. Nevertheless, this lack-of-control sensation is more of a subjective sensation rather than a reality. There’s not a single documented case in which it has happened during a panic attack. Worst case scenario, a person would escape from the situation where they suffered the attack by “securing themselves”. This is something that the patient must do consciously and voluntarily.
In your next panic attack, don’t worry, stay calm, your muscles will do what you tell them to do!