For many people with panic disorder, other people are a significant source of anxiety. The good news: communication is a learnable skill, and improving it directly reduces this source of anxiety.
People can be a significant source of anxiety for those with panic disorder. Difficult conversations, critical feedback, awkward silences, the fear of being judged — these can feel like genuine threats, triggering the same fight-or-flight response as physical danger. The body doesn't distinguish well between social and physical threat.
But the key insight is this: your reaction to these situations is not fixed. Communication is a skill, and skills can be developed. As you become more confident in handling difficult interactions, the anxiety around them diminishes — not because the situations change, but because you do.
"By not taking a defensive stance, you allow the other person to feel heard — and in doing so, you defuse rather than escalate the situation."
Think of someone you've known who handled difficult situations with remarkable calm — someone who could receive criticism or challenge without becoming defensive. What made them effective was not that they agreed with everything said to them. It was that they didn't react with defensiveness, which would have made things worse.
Communication techniques developed by Dr. David Burns offer a practical framework for this. The core principle: find something in what the other person is saying that you can genuinely agree with — even a small grain of truth — and acknowledge it before responding to the rest.
Note that you haven't agreed with everything, or capitulated. You've found something to acknowledge, which creates an opening rather than a wall. The other person feels heard. You haven't triggered either person's fight-or-flight. And the conversation has somewhere to go.
Poor communication — defensive exchanges, unresolved conflicts, the rumination that follows a difficult interaction — is one of the most persistent and draining sources of anxiety in daily life. Each time you improve how you handle a difficult situation, you remove one source of that anxiety. Over time the cumulative effect is significant.