A man describes brief episodes, several times a week, in which intense dread suddenly overwhelms him, peaking within a few minutes along with a racing heart and breathlessness, before subsiding completely and leaving him feeling entirely normal in between episodes. Before revealing the answer: is this anxious foreboding?

No, this is more consistent with recurrent panic attacks than anxious foreboding. Anxious foreboding differs from a panic attack in being a sustained background sense of dread rather than a discrete, rapidly peaking episode — here, the dread is confined to brief, intense, physically accompanied episodes with complete recovery in between, which is exactly the discrete, episodic pattern that marks a panic attack rather than the continuous, low-grade quality of anxious foreboding. Recognising the episodic, time-limited structure of what he describes, rather than treating 'feeling dread' as a single undifferentiated symptom, is what correctly identifies this as panic attacks.