Panic Attack Newbie - any advice?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Most doctors will give you a canned response of “take walks and do deep breathing.”

When you feel like the world is ending and your heart is boiling inside your chest, a WALK is the last thing you want to do.

And the deep breathing sounds STUPID because you aren’t getting enough air in a panic attack!

I had a few sessions with a therapist (along with medication) and she explained to me exactly what the “deep breathing does.”

When you panic, your heart pounds, your mind races, and you hyperventilate. These are all automatic responses, to prepare you for the primal “fight or flight” reaction.

Of those three responses, you only have conscious control over ONE: breathing. Yeah, yeah, I know, you are panting like a dog, and your hands are getting tingly, and you are smothered in horror. Take a few seconds and STOP.

The deep breathing takes practice. Focus on inhaling and exhaling as slowly as you can. Count to yourself as you do this. At first, you’ll only be able to count to maybe five. Keep working at it, get up to ten. Then maybe fifteen.

You WILL be able to slow your breathing down.

By slowing down your breathing, you are stomping on a huge brake pedal in your body’s automatic reaction to fear. The other reactions, the fear and the racing heart WILL follow the slow-down that you have controlled by the deep breathing.

It does take practice. And frankly, when you are in the middle of OHMYGAWDIMGONNADIE, this is HARD. If you have a very sympathetic friend or relative who can breathe with you and help you focus, that’s wonderful.

When the panic subsides, you’ll need to practice the deep breathing on your own. And then it won’t be so difficult to switch to the deep breathing when the terror hits again.

When you AREN’T in a panic attack, take walks as often as you can. It breaks up your day, it creates endorphins through the exercise, and just getting OUTSIDE those walls that seem to close in will give you a different perspective.

It WILL get better. Really.
~VOW

22

Oh, hon :frowning: You’ve been to hell and back! :frowning:

No caffeine, no booze and get plenty of sleep – if you can sleep, that is.

Go to the doc. Just because the doc gives you some meds doesn’t mean you have to take them … but they’re there if you need them, ya know?

If you broke your leg, would you wait around a few days to see if you could fix it on your own before going to the ER? No, you’d go get a cast. This is NO different. You’re grieving, you just moved, you’re stressed out at work, you went through a damn fire – this is off-the-charts upheaval that would literally kill some people.

hugs Hang in there!!

23

**VOW **is right - slowing your breathing really does help. While you’re practicing that, breathe into a paper bag. Sounds silly, but it makes you rebreathe air that’s higher in carbon dioxide, and - somewhat paradoxically - gives you more oxygen actually available to your blood than rapid breathing of unregulated air does.

Beta blockers work by affecting another thing **VOW *brings up: heart rate. Beta blockers actually make it nearly impossible for your heart rate to increase past a certain point. This also breaks the tachycardia (rapid heart rate) —>panic---->tachycardia—>panic cycle. The nice thing about beta blockers is that they don’t have mental side effects and they can be used only as needed, when you’re facing a situation that’s likely to trigger panic, like flying or public speaking. If your panic attacks are truly random, they’re less helpful, though, because they take about half an hour to kick in.

If you’d like to try something holistic, read up on progressive relaxation. Basically, you concentrate on tensing your toes as hard as you can and then letting go. Then you tense your whole foot and let go. Then you tense your calves and let go, and so on. Gives you something to think about, and it’s more physically effective than just telling yourself to relax.

Lavender essential oil calms some people down. A small bottle of lavender essential oil can be kept in your purse and taken out for a gentle whiff when you need it.

But yes, you need to see a doctor ASAP. It would be a heck of a coincidence, but just because you’ve been through a stressful time lately, that doesn’t mean you can’t have an adrenal tumor or hyperthyroidism or some other physical cause for these feelings. Get the easy stuff ruled out before you try to treat the hard stuff.

*Some runners take beta blockers while training in the couple of weeks before a marathon. Because their hearts cannot beat faster, they instead pump harder, and the muscle actually gets larger and stronger. Then before the marathon, they stop the beta blockers and their now stronger heart helps them run longer without getting winded.

24

Check your blood pressure, even if you’ve never had any history with hypertension.

When your Blood Pressure rises suddenly, it can pound your endocrine system and produce emotional volatility. If it is BP and you don’t identify it, it will continue to rise and drop, until you land in hospital, possibly with a stroke, etc.

While I didn’t have a stroke, I did learn all of this the hard way. An experience I would not wish on anyone. Looking back, just a week before I landed in hospital, I had my first ever panic attack!

25

Beta blockers are used both for controlling panic attacks and for lowering blood pressure.

Panic and anxiety can cause your blood pressure to spike up. The causality can work the other way, too.

26

So, here’s an update, if anyone is interested:

I scheduled an appointment with a therapist, and went to see my regular doctor. My doctor reassured me that I was having a perfectly normal response to extreme stress, and that it was also within a reasonable timeframe. She agreed with me making a therapist’s appointment, and told me to come back and see her if I wasn’t feeling any relief by September.

I started to believe that I didn’t actually have rabies. I contacted a couple of animal control and bat conservation experts just for reassurance and kept a little journal of rabies facts in case I started to feel a little jikey. I found that playing meaningless video games like Tetris really helped arrest enough of my concentration to keep me from full-on freakout mode. My panic attacks subsided, but I was still waking up after about an hour of sleep and not going back to bed until 3-4 am. It seemed like the more tired I was, the harder time I was having getting back to sleep.

So, I cut drastically back on caffeine and limited my alcohol intake to maybe one beer twice a week. I started going to bed earlier, cutting out naps, and upping my cardio to try to wear myself out. On nights when I felt a little buzzy, I took 3mg of melatonin (on my doctor’s advice). Eventually, it all went away. Occasionally, I still wake up and thing OMG THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! but I’ve learned to quickly calm myself and go right back to sleep.

My therapist’s appointment was supposed to be today. I called earlier this week to cancel. I wont’ hesitate to reschedule if things start to get crazy again, but I think I may have come out of this. This summer sucked ass, but it’s autumn now. :slight_smile:

Thanks to everyone who offered their advice and encouragement.

27

Thanks for the update. I’m happy to hear you’re doing so much better. It sounds like you found the right combination of treatments and lifestyle changes to work for you. Have a happy and relaxing autumn!

28

Good outcome.

If I might, can I suggest keep seeing your PCP if you can afford it? I pay out of my own pocket, between 2-3 times per year, and it’s money well spent for me. Yeah, it’s expensive, but I feel having a very good cat with lots of clinical experience is worth it. I’d be nowhere without someone in my corner – maybe I got lucky in having a personal referral to his private practice, but he’s my one guy who (a) knows some stuff I don’t and (b) I like and relate to as a person.