Fear of the Fear: Why Panic Starts to Feed on Itself

You know the feeling. Your heart skips, then picks up speed. A flush of heat moves up through your chest. Your breath goes shallow. And underneath all of it, a second thing arrives that’s somehow worse than the first — a quiet, sinking dread: Oh no. It’s happening again.

That second wave has a name. It’s fear of the fear. And for a lot of people, it’s the real engine driving their panic.

I know it well, because I lived inside it for almost ten years.

After one particularly rough flight, I developed a phobia of flying. Not a mild case of nerves — a full-body, white-knuckle dread that had me reorganizing my life to avoid getting on a plane. 

The trouble was that I had to fly for work. So I tried to think my way out of it. I took a fear-of-flying course with a wonderful pilot named Captain Ron at the Phoenix airport. I interviewed pilots. I interviewed an aerospace engineer about exactly how planes stay in the air. I downed kava kava, practiced deep breathing, meditated, prayed. And when none of that held, I took a sedative, curled into the fetal position in my seat, and tried not to cry until the plane touched down.

Here’s what made it so maddening: it made no logical sense. 

I knew flying was safe. My analytical brain was completely on board with the statistics. 

But my body hadn’t gotten the memo. And eventually I understood why. I wasn’t actually afraid of flying. I was afraid of how afraid I would feel once the doors closed. 

The fear itself had become the thing I was running from.

What is “fear of the fear”?

Fear of the fear is exactly what it sounds like: being afraid of the physical and emotional sensations of fear itself. 

Instead of the racing heart, the tingling, the lightheadedness being uncomfortable-but-survivable signals, they become threats in their own right. Your body produces a normal stress sensation, you brace against it, and the bracing produces more sensation. The feeling becomes the danger, and the danger produces more feeling. That’s the loop.

It’s one of the most common things people describe to me. They’re not afraid of the meeting, or the drive, or the dinner party. They’re afraid that while they’re there, the panic will come — and that they won’t be able to handle it.

Why fear of the fear is so hard to shake

When fear of the fear takes hold, it rarely stays put. It spreads.

First you avoid the thing that scared you. Then you start avoiding anything that reminds you of it. Then you avoid situations where you might not be able to escape easily if the panic came. Without quite noticing, you find yourself turning down invitations, planning your routes around exits, saying no to things you used to love. Your world gets a little smaller, and then a little smaller again.

This is the part I want to name clearly: that shrinking is not weakness, and it’s not you being dramatic. It’s a protective response. When your body has been through something it experienced as dangerous — including a panic attack — it does exactly what it was designed to do. It tries to keep you away from the danger in the future. 

Fear makes you faster, more watchful, more ready. Your nervous system is working overtime to protect you. The problem is that it’s guarding against a threat that isn’t actually there, and the guarding costs you your life as you want to live it.

Why fighting it makes it stronger

The instinct, of course, is to fight. To push the fear down. To white-knuckle through, distract yourself, talk yourself out of it, make it stop.

I understand the instinct, because I tried all of it. But here’s what I learned the hard way: resisting fear feeds it.

When you tell your body it shouldn’t be feeling what it’s feeling, you’re sending it one more signal that something is wrong. You’re confirming the alarm. The harder you brace against the sensation, the more your system concludes that the sensation must be dangerous — why else would you be fighting it so hard? So it sends more. 

This is part of why the coping strategies that used to work eventually stop working. They were aimed at silencing the messenger, and the messenger only gets louder.

The shift that actually changes things

What finally moved the needle for me wasn’t a better way to fight the fear. It was a different relationship with it entirely.

In my work I call this radical acknowledgment, and I want to be clear about what it is and isn’t. It is not surrender. It is not letting the panic flatten you. It’s a turn in your internal posture — from resistance to curiosity. From “make this stop” to “what are you trying to tell me?”

When the sensations rise, instead of bracing, you let them be there. You name what’s happening without judgment: My heart is racing. My chest is tight. This is my body’s stress response, and it’s uncomfortable, and it is not dangerous. That shift alone can take a surprising amount of fuel out of an attack, because so much of panic’s intensity comes from the fear stacked on top of it.

A few things are worth holding onto when you practice this: 

• Fear is a normal human emotion, and like every emotion, it’s temporary. It rises, it crests, and — if you let it — it passes. It cannot sustain itself forever, even when it feels like it could.
• Your emotions are not dangerous. The racing heart, the heat, the tingling: these are loud, physical messages from a body that is trying, in its own overzealous way, to keep you safe. They are signals to listen to, not enemies to defeat.
• And calm is a skill, not a personality trait. You can learn to work with your body — your breath, your nervous system, your physiology — to bring yourself down from activation. Not by force, but by understanding what your body needs and giving it that.

You are not broken

If you take one thing from this, let it be this: a body that produces fear of the fear is not a broken body. It’s a body that learned, at some point, that fear meant danger and that it had better stay on guard. That’s not a malfunction. It’s an adaptation. A remarkably intelligent one.

And because it was learned, it can be unlearned. I know that because I lived it. After a lot of the work I now teach, I booked another flight. And it was wonderful. So I booked another. And another. The fear that had quietly walled off so much of my life simply lifted, and my world opened back up.

I tell you that not to promise it will be instant — it usually isn’t — but because I want you to know, all the way down, that it’s possible. The same nervous system that learned to fear the fear can learn that it’s safe.

Ready to go deeper?

Fear of the fear is one thread in a much larger story about why your body produces panic — and what it’s been trying to tell you all along.

My book, Panic Proof: The New Holistic Solution to End Your Anxiety Forever (Penguin Random House), is the full roadmap: how to read your body’s signals, the nine types of anxiety and why they matter, and how to address the root of panic rather than just bracing against the symptoms. It’s written for exactly where you are right now.

[Get your copy of Panic Proof here →] GET PANIC PROOF

Dr. Nicole Cain, ND, MA, is a licensed naturopathic physician and EMDR-trained psychotherapist specializing in anxiety, panic, and trauma through an integrative, whole-person approach. She is the author of Panic Proof (Penguin Random House) and the founder of the Holistic Wellness Collective.

This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized medical care. If you are struggling with panic or anxiety, please reach out to a qualified professional.