Why Panic Can Feel Like It Comes From Nowhere

One of the strangest things about panic is how often it arrives without a story attached. There's no clear reason, nothing you can point to, just the alarm going off in the middle of an ordinary moment.

In an earlier piece, I wrote about panic as an attachment alarm rather than a fear response. Panic isn't your brain asking "am I in danger?" It's an old, loud signal built to maintain connection, telling you that you're disconnected right now, or convinced that disconnection is about to happen. That system, which researchers call PANIC/GRIEF, runs on different chemistry than fear does and directly affects your breathing, heart rate, and pain sensitivity, which is why the alarm shows up as a full-body event rather than just a thought.

What I want to get into here is a different question. Why does the alarm so often go off with no obvious trigger? Why does it feel like it's coming from nowhere?

Two kinds of attention

I think part of the answer has to do with how the two halves of the brain handle information differently, an idea the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent much of his career working out.

His argument isn't the old, oversimplified version you may have heard, that the left brain does logic and the right brain does creativity. McGilchrist's case is that the two hemispheres aren't divided by subject matter at all. They're divided by the kind of attention each one pays to the world. Both hemispheres are involved in most of what the brain does. They just interact with experience in different ways.

The right hemisphere takes in the whole picture at once: context, relationship, body state, the things that are true but haven't been put into words yet. It's comfortable holding something ambiguous without rushing to resolve it. The left hemisphere works differently. It wants the explicit, the categorized, the already-known. It's fast and confident, and according to McGilchrist, it doesn't know what it doesn't know. If something doesn't fit a category it already has, the left hemisphere tends to filter it out rather than sit with the uncertainty.

McGilchrist also argues that the right hemisphere is more closely tied to the body, to reading relational and emotional cues, and to intense emotional states in general, especially the harder ones like fear and distress.

A signal with nowhere to go

Put those two pieces together and it starts to make sense how you can know something and not know it at the same time.

It's entirely possible for your right hemisphere to pick up on something real: a shift in someone's tone, a withdrawal, a relationship that's fraying, a sense that you're more alone in a room full of people than you should be. All of that can register well before it can be put into words or sorted into a category the left hemisphere will accept. If the left hemisphere can't find a clean, explicit story for what's being sensed, it may not integrate the signal at all. The information doesn't vanish. It just doesn't make it into the version of events you're consciously telling yourself.

So the body notices something and signals it, but the signal has no way into the ordinary channel of thought and language. This might be part of why Freud paid such close attention to slips of the tongue, words that come out unintended and seem out of place, and to dream interpretation, even though he wouldn't have described it in these terms. Both were attempts to reach content that was present but blocked from conscious, verbal access. The PANIC/GRIEF system doesn't need permission from your conscious narrative to act. If the felt sense of disconnection is strong enough and the explicit story isn't catching up to it, the alarm keeps escalating until it's loud enough that you can't ignore it. That's one way to understand why panic so often hits with no obvious trigger. The trigger was there. It just didn't pass through the part of the brain that explains things to you in words.

Why this matters for treatment

This is a contested area of neuroscience. McGilchrist's broader claims about the hemispheres have real critics, and some argue he overstates how cleanly these functions divide. So know that this isn't settled fact.

But the narrower point, that something can be accurately sensed in the body and in relationship before it's consciously articulated, fits well with what's already known about how the PANIC/GRIEF system works. It doesn't wait for you to have a sentence ready. It acts on what's felt, not on what's been said yet.

That has a practical implication. If the original signal never passed through the part of you built to name, define, and explain things in words, then reassuring yourself in that same verbal mode is less likely to help than something that can reach the signal where it actually lives. You can tell someone, accurately, that there's no danger in the room, and it can still miss the point, because the alarm was never about the room. This is a big part of why somatic and body-based approaches tend to reach panic in a way that talking alone doesn't. The work isn't just building a better explanation. It's helping the part of you that senses things before it can name them learn, slowly, that it's not as alone as it fears, and that it now has more capacity to handle grief and aloneness than it did back when it first learned to be afraid of them.

Reference notes: McGilchrist's claims about hemispheric attention styles, the right hemisphere's role in holding ambiguity and context, the left hemisphere's tendency toward premature categorization and closure, and the right hemisphere's closer relationship to bodily and relational awareness, come from his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and his 2021 follow-up The Matter with Things. These claims are influential but not uncontested. Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College, published a critical assessment in 2019, "McGilchrist and hemisphere lateralization: a neuroscientific and metaanalytic assessment," in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, arguing that recent meta-analyses do not support the sweeping, oppositional picture of hemispheric difference McGilchrist describes. The connection between this framework and panic attacks specifically is my own synthesis, drawn from putting McGilchrist's model of attention alongside the PANIC/GRIEF research of Jaak Panksepp covered in the companion piece, not a claim McGilchrist has made himself.

The Cult of Meaning-Making: When Thinking Hijacks Feeling

In our fast-paced culture, thinking is often elevated as the highest human function—our prized problem-solver, meaning-maker, and escape hatch. But thinking, as necessary as it is, can become a trap. Especially when it overrides our capacity to feel.

Neuroscience tells us that emotions come first. Literally. We feel before we think. Research by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (2012) demonstrates that emotional experience arises from deep subcortical structures in the brain—what they call the “core self”—before the neocortex (the seat of conscious thought) even gets involved.

Yet when we feel overwhelmed, vulnerable, or dysregulated, we often reach for thinking as a shield. We lean into analysis, planning, interpreting—often without realizing we're doing it to avoid the raw intensity of emotion. This pattern shows up neurologically in the dominance of the left prefrontal cortex—what psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (2010) describes as the left hemisphere’s narrow, detail-focused grasp on the world.

McGilchrist’s work reveals that the left hemisphere, especially the top-left-frontal region, tends to "make meaning" even when it lacks full data. It creates interpretations to soothe uncertainty—even if the result is distorted, fragmented, or, frankly, wrong. It favors coherence over truth. It would rather invent an answer than admit it doesn't know.

And here’s the rub: the left brain doesn’t have direct access to the richness of lived experience. It depends on the right hemisphere—our embodied, relational, and emotionally attuned brain—for that. The left side is secondary. A translator. A map-maker, not a navigator. As McGilchrist puts it, “The right hemisphere sees the whole, the left sees the parts and confuses the map for the territory” (McGilchrist, 2010).

The danger is cultural as well as personal. A society dominated by left-brain modes of thought can become obsessed with control, explanation, and certainty. Feeling is dismissed as irrational. Intuition is sidelined. Opinion replaces embodied knowing. As a result, we become more reactive, less reflective—and more cut off from ourselves.

But there’s another way.

Like many in the fields of affective neuroscience and psychotherapy, I invite a return to the wisdom of the body. As developmental neuropsychologist Allan Schore (2012) suggests, we can "shift down and to the right"—from the high-speed highways of left-brain cognition to the slower, more relational terrain of the right hemisphere and subcortical brain.

This shift asks us to pause. To feel. To listen to our body’s signals—its tension, breath, heart rate, gut response—before rushing to interpret or explain. It’s in this space, Schore says, that self-regulation becomes possible. And once we’re regulated, the deeper wisdom stored in our emotional and somatic systems begins to rise.

Our nervous systems are not just reactive—they're adaptive. But they need time. Time to feel before we think. Time to notice before we narrate. Time to allow the truth of our experience to emerge from the inside out—not be forced from the top down.

So let’s resist the cult of premature meaning-making. Let’s be willing to not know for a little while longer. In that not-knowing, something truer may take shape.

References

• Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. W. W. Norton & Company.

• McGilchrist, I. (2010). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

• Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

The Two Sides of Your Brain: Digital Life and Mental Well-being

Drawing from psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's groundbreaking work, we can understand how modern technology affects our brain through its distinct hemispheric systems. The left hemisphere, primarily operating through dopamine pathways, has found its perfect match in social media and smartphone technology. Each notification, like, and scroll creates a small dopamine hit, feeding our left hemisphere's appetite for quick, predictable rewards.

This explains why we often find ourselves caught in cycles of compulsive phone checking and social media browsing. The left hemisphere's dopamine-driven nature craves these bite-sized pieces of digital stimulation, much like a slot machine that occasionally pays out. The fragmentary nature of social media—breaking life into discrete, manageable chunks of information—perfectly suits the left hemisphere's preference for categorization and control.

Meanwhile, the right hemisphere, regulated by noradrenaline, yearns for novel, real-world experiences that can't be reduced to pixels and likes. This hemisphere thrives on the unexpected, the contextual, and the embodied experiences that make life rich and meaningful. It's activated when we explore new places, engage in face-to-face conversations, or immerse ourselves in nature's unpredictability.

Practical Application for Digital Balance

To restore hemispheric harmony in our digital age, try this approach:

When you notice yourself caught in a social media loop, recognize it as your left hemisphere's dopamine-seeking behavior. Counter this by intentionally engaging your right hemisphere through novel experiences: take an unfamiliar route home, strike up a conversation with a stranger, or visit a new location without documenting it on social media.

Create "novel experience days" where you deliberately avoid digital devices and instead engage in activities that challenge your right hemisphere's noradrenaline system: explore a new hiking trail, attend a live music performance, or try cooking without a recipe. These experiences might feel less immediately rewarding than social media's dopamine hits, but they provide deeper, more sustained satisfaction.

Remember: while our devices cater brilliantly to our left hemisphere's dopamine-driven nature, our overall well-being depends on balancing this with right-hemispheric, noradrenaline-based experiences that connect us to the broader, richer context of life beyond our screens.