Confessions of an Anxiety Attack: An Open-Ended Narrative

Got away can’t sense stop feel panic panic panic look away get out help.

This is what my thoughts sound like when I’m going through a panic attack.

Before I start, here’s some PR control for you. As I've said before, I’m not a licensed therapist or a doctor and I don’t pretend to be – but I am someone who has dealt with anxiety and it’s symptoms for over eight years now. I can’t tell you how many panic attacks I’ve had, but I can tell you that I’ve had the good fortune of thinking ahead of time to track what they feel like. You see, before I ever wanted to be a journalist I first wanted to be a scientist, and even though I sadly found out that I suck at math and can’t remember what the chemical equation of photosynthesis is for the life of me, I still have this inner sense of objectivity and curiosity about the world around me. Because of this, I have always been determined to self-observe my own anxiety in hopes of finding a way I, myself, can cope with it. Just as there are a million different forms of the cold virus, there are a million different ways of both suffering from and coping with anxiety – so what I tell you works for me, most certainly will not work for everyone. This is just my story.

Imagine yourself, sitting on a bed watching a movie. Maybe you’re with a friend or a significant other or something like that. All of a sudden, there’s a loud high-pitched noise from the movie and your heart starts to beat harder. The first sign some *ish* is about to go down is irritability. Suddenly, the sound of someone breathing is enough to make you want to punch them in the face. Nothing is sacred.

Why? What the heck? What just happened? Why are my ears burning?

Your heart is going to explode. You know what’s about to happen, and it only makes the pounding faster. The symptoms begin to start uncontrollably, like trying to hold onto sand as it slips through your fingers.

You glance at your hands quickly so that your boyfriend won’t notice. They’re shaking slightly and your palms are starting to sweat. Your heart keeps pounding. You can imagine the blood coursing through your body starting to speed up; maybe it will go so fast your veins will burst and you’ll bleed to death. Images like this start to flood your brain, and you can feel your breathing intensifying. That’s because your lungs are next.

Your breathing becomes labored, as if someone has slid their hands through your ribcage and grasped your esophagus like the end of a rope. You can feel your lungs tightening, which in turn, sends chemicals to your brain telling you that you are dying. This is called “fight-or-flight” mode and I’ll explain more of that in a second.

Next are your thoughts. This is the part I hate the most. They begin to jumble; picture someone taking a scrabble board with letters neatly organized on it and then just table-flipping the hell out of that thing. You try frantically to put sentences together but no matter what you do they don’t make any sense. This makes verbalizing what’s going on to your boyfriend nearly impossible. Of course, whoever is with you when you reach this far is freaking out because all of a sudden, out of nowhere, their girlfriend is shaking, sweating, and saying things like “Got away can’t sense stop feel panic panic panic look away get out help.”

Naturally, they’re kind of concerned.

But you can’t tell them what’s happening because just like if you were to get down on all fours over those scrabble pieces and flipped table, you just can’t put sentences together fast enough to explain. And the more you franticly try, the worse it gets.

Your eyes begin to glaze –things are fuzzy, dreamlike almost. Motion seems to be slowing down, then rapidly speeding up again. All the while your body is going into hyperventilation and you have your boyfriend about ready to call an ambulance. As your body shakes, sweats, and tenses, your mind is slowly reaching a cusp where the water is about to come pouring out over the edges. Suddenly, you and all those scrabble pieces on the floor are floating in zero-gravity for a split second, before abruptly erupting into earthquake chaos around you. Your thoughts explode. You can’t keep up with the millions of questions and confusion spinning around your mind.

Depending on the severity, it has probably been about 5 minutes of this. Sometimes it can be 30 seconds, sometimes hours.

At this point, I am usually sobbing through heavy breaths, wildly looking around for a place of sanctuary that won’t appear for me, desperately wanting to escape my own body. When these attacks started, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what was going on. I legitimately thought I had just had a mental break, and ventured to the crazy side of consciousness. Through my own research, I self-diagnosed myself with mild anxiety. I know I don’t have the authority to do that, but I don’t care. It is what it is, they happen the same whether I give it a name or not.

Now that I have given a very general sense of what it feels like for me personally when I go through one of these “attacks,” let me share a bit about how I’ve been able to cope with them.

You should know right off the bat that my personal approach to this is probably unconventional. I don’t like taking pills, not because I’m a conspiracy-theorist junkie but simply because there are two things that are part of my fundamental beliefs: self-reliance and nature, and I believe they coincide with each other nicely for this. I’m not condoning people who take medication, it’s just not for me.

So, with that being said, let me explain a little about the “fight-or-flight” mode I mentioned earlier. Long ago, when humans depended on instincts and biological traits to keep us alive, we developed a “sixth-sense” if you will, that kept our race from being eaten to extinction. Animals have it too so we’re not necessarily unique. This sense has been commonly referred to as the “fight-or-flight” mode by laymen like myself. Your body is chemically engineered to go into a “fight-or-flight” mode, otherwise known as panic, so that it can stay alive. Biologically this makes sense for us, but sometimes the body goes into this panic mode when there’s no real danger present, hence known as panic attacks. It therefore becomes a vicious cycle; the more responsive your body is to the panic, the more you panic, and the more your body responds.

The same kind of panic happens when you start to hyperventilate, so for example, if you’re running on the treadmill a little too fast and your body beings to hyperventilate, you will suddenly feel that panicky feeling because your throat is closing up.  That feeling of panic is the chemical signal to your brain to tell your body it’s time for “flight,” thus causing your body’s physical reactions. Unfortunately, if you can’t break this cycle with eliminating the “eminent danger,” (or basically calming yourself down) then you would actually die – it’s not a joke, people have done it before doing stupid dares or YouTube trends. This is how humans, and other animals, have managed to evade predators all these years, so it should be no surprise that we have continued to carry on this trait despite our lesser need for it in the modern age. But what about disorders? What about these “attacks”? Why am I going into “fight-or-flight” mode simply from hearing a loud, annoying noise on a TV screen?

There’s almost no telling what will set off my panic attacks. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone else, but at first it seemed impossible to pin-point when, where, and how a panic attack would start. Often times, doctors advise patients who are struggling with eating disorders to keep a food journal of what they eat every day, so that they can become aware of their habits and discover patterns. Documenting each attack seemed the only logical way to study what might be causing them – so I started keeping a Panic Journal.

Totally.

Every time I had an attack, I made conscious effort to remember what happened before, what I had eaten that day, how much exercise I had gotten, what my schedule was like, what symptoms I experienced, how long the attack went for, and most importantly, what seemed to make it go away. Every detail I could remember, I wrote down. I hoped that by documenting these variables, I could look back on my Panic Journal and discover some kind of constant that I could control. Over the course of several years, I finally began seeing patterns and finding “triggers” that I could count on to set me off. I also began discovering temporary solutions to snapping me out of the attacks – and even though they weren’t permanent, they were sufficient in the moment.

Here’s what I learned about myself and I’m hoping if you’re reading this and thinking of your own experiences, maybe it will help you too.

Reoccurring triggers for me went like this:

·         Lack of protein in morning and midday meals

·         Extreme heat

·         Loud, high-pitched, sudden noises

·         High caffeine intake

·         Sitting for long periods of time

·         A stressful schedule (of course)

·         Going for days without a break or someone to “vent” to (as for many people)

The worst things to have happen during one of the triggers that can supplement the attack go like this:

·         Someone attempting to converse with me

·         The loud noise continuing to happen

·         Someone attempting to vent to me

·         Being asked to do something

·         Someone demanding to know what’s wrong

·         Groups of people

·         No escape from the physical heat

The difference between these and the triggers is that these things don’t necessarily start an attack – in fact, if you’re a normal person these things happen quite often on their own. They just make it a lot harder to control when an attack is about to happen. Triggers, also, aren’t always 100% bound to make me react. They are just reoccurring things to be aware of for me.

To combat some of these triggers, I have a list of “weapons” (really? Am I using that word?) that I use to help control the attack:

·         Cold water

·         Being alone

·         Having someone squeeze me (not kidding – a bear hug from someone who quietly knows what’s going on is like the best thing ever for me)

·         Outdoors

·         Protein foods like turkey or peanut butter

·         Gently touching my forearm

·         Silence

·         A place I can write down a list

·         Deep, controlled breathing

All of these things have proven to be fantastic remedies for me when encountering the panic feeling. However, without a doubt, my most utilized tool to snap myself out of an attack, or even in preventing one, is my mind. Yes, you heard me, we’re totally taking a trip down hippy-dippy lane.

 

The cure to anxiety attacks: just think of Fraulein Maria and the von Trapp children's "Favorite Things" song and BAM - easy as that. Just kidding, it's a little more complicated and there's less strudel involved.

No but seriously, I firmly believe that our minds are a lot stronger than we think they are, and they can be a powerful asset in maintaining control over your own body. In this modern age where we have a pill to solve your problem for you, it seems almost foolish to depend on your mind during an attack where your mind is part of the problem. I don’t know if you remember your sophomore year history class, but some of the best armies of the past defeated their enemies by using their opponent’s tactics against them. If you want to control your mind, use it against itself. It’s that powerful.

Ultimately, my brain is the one freaking out the rest of my body with this “fight-or-flight” stuff. In past blog posts, I wrote about personal mantras that help me be a better athlete. A similar concept can be used to calm yourself out of a panic attack. For me, thinking things like “control,” or “calm,” or “focus” are all signals I use to keep my brain in check. Unlike the mantras I use for volleyball that are longer sentences, it is more helpful in this case to use single words because, if you can remember my description earlier about the scrabble-table-flip, it’s nearly impossible to think in sentences during an attack. Single words carry just as much gravity.

I hope that if any of this has related to you, it has helped you in some way start to grasp your own struggle with anxiety. Even if you don’t have that going on, which I hope you don’t, perhaps now you feel more aware of what a friend or loved one who has anxiety goes through. I hesitated in writing this post because I was hoping you wouldn’t see me as a victim – I even hate using the word “suffered” for me because, well, I don’t suffer from it. It doesn’t run my life and it certainly never will. It has, however, become a part of me, and for those of you who don’t agree with me accepting that, that’s fine. I know who I am and I know what I am capable of. It’s all a part of playing the cards you get, and doing so well enough that you can get through the whole game. Everyone’s got something goin’ on!

Carry on friends! Take a deep breath and keep on keepin’ on. Learning about what makes us who we are is exactly what keeps us so wonderful.