Your body produces hormones for many useful purposes: they cause you to grow and develop correctly, they regulate your metabolism, and they determine whether or not you are capable of reproduction. However, they can also be partially responsible for panic attacks.

Panic attacks that seem to come out of nowhere can often be traced back to your hormones. You suddenly feel nervous or worried about something, and within 10 minutes your heart is racing, you're hyperventilating and you may feel nauseous, detached from your own body, or even convinced you're about to die. Luckily, the hormonal causes for these feelings can be controlled and regulated to reduce the frequency of panic attacks and hopefully even stop them altogether.

The Hormones Responsible for Panic

To be fair to you hormones, the ones that tell you to panic are usually doing it for a reason. Your body is a complex system that is built to survive, which is why is has mechanisms like the fight or flight response. Hormone imbalances may even be caused by your mental health, leading to a self-sustaining cycle.

However, any hormonal imbalance may result in fight or flight being triggered at the slightest discomfort or concern, resulting in all the reactions your body would need to confront or escape a dangerous situation except that the dangerous situation never occurs. Your lungs overwork themselves trying to capture extra oxygen to send to your heart, and your heart pounds, sending newly oxygen-rich blood to every part of your body. The only problem is, your body doesn't need or use it, which confuses it and causes it to send you distress signals such as dizziness and nausea.

An excess of these types of hormones significantly increases the likelihood of panic attacks in situations where they are not called for:

• Stress Hormones The hormones cortisol and epinephrine (also known as adrenaline, the primary fight of flight hormone) are released when the body experiences stress. Over an extended period of time, the persistent overabundance of these hormones can actually perpetuate the cycle of stress, causing weight loss, sleep disruption, and high blood pressure.
• *Sexual (Steroid) Hormones*An increase in sexual (or steroid) hormones estrogen and testosterone has been linked to periods of increased bodily stress: they are highly active during teenage years for both males and females when the body is developing, and particularly in women during their menstrual cycles, pregnancy and menopause. These are periods of tension and high stress, where hyper-reactivity is common.
• Thyroid Hormones In some (but not all) people, an overproduction of thyroid hormone (also known as hyperthyroidism) results in stress-reactions including an increased heart rate, heavier breathing, weight loss, and excessive sweating.

If you suspect (or know) that your panic attacks are rooted in one of these hormone imbalances, it is important to figure out what factors in your life are causing the imbalance. From there you can look at the options for treating your hormone imbalance.

Common Causes of Hormonal Imbalance

Ironically, the very hormonal imbalances that perpetuate stress and panic attacks are also often caused by stress. This may be the stress caused by your daily life (whether you have an anxiety disorder or are simply under a lot of pressure from life's two primary stress sources: work and relationships), or it may simply be the result of the stage of life you are at (and how high your hormone levels are). However, it is thought to be possible to be genetically predisposed to hyperthyroidism, which can have several different causes. These include:

• Graves' disease - A disease that causes antibodies to attack the thyroid as if it were a foreign substance in the body, resulting in an increased release of the thyroid hormone.
• Plummer's disease This disease results in an enlargement of the thyroid due to the growth of (non-cancerous) lumps or goiters in the glands within it.
• Thyroiditis Sometimes occurring after a pregnancy (but not exclusive to women), thyroiditis is an inflammation of the thyroid (a gland located in your neck) that results in an increase of thyroid hormone production.

Women are more susceptible to hormone-related panic attacks than men. This is because women experience more sexual hormone imbalances than men, due to the extreme bodily changes they undergo throughout their lives, and also due to the fact that they are 10 times more likely than men to develop hyperthyroidism.