Panic attacks are distressing, but the psychological damage can persist for years.
If you have had a number of panic attacks, it is likely that you will begin to avoid specific activities and places.
These are usually the activities and places where you first experienced the panic attack.
This type of avoidance can become so severe as to limit your entire life.
It will have an effect on your personal life, your marriage, career, and so on.
It will also have an impact on your social life.
You need to tackle the panic attacks before they reach this stage.
In extreme cases you may be unable to leave the house except when accompanied by someone, and then only for brief periods of time.
The precise pattern of the avoidance behaviour is determined mainly by your specific fears.
For example if you fear that exercise may induce a heart attack you will avoid energetic physical activity such as sports.
This type of avoidance behaviour is self perpetuating and self sustaining.
You are now re-asserting to yourself that you will have a panic attack if you are in any of the situations you have grown to fear.
This in itself makes it more likely that you will indeed suffer an attack in those situations.
There are two common threads of thought on the approaches for changing this type of behaviour.
One is called 'flooding' and the other is called 'desensitization'.
I do not recommend the 'flooding' approach; it requires you to throw yourself headlong into what you fear.
The other approach requires that you take a steady and gradual approach to conquering your fear.
An example of this for someone who fears taking physical activity would be phasing your approach over a few weeks, for example a short walk on day one, a slightly longer walk on day two an so on.
Panic attacks can be cured; it is just a case of finding the right approach for you.