Panic Attacks

The following article will probably come as a surprise to everybody that reads this. It’s only now that this period of my life has passed that I can reflect on it openly and honestly, and really talk about what I felt when I was going through it. I made the choice to deal with it the way I did, and I don’t regret it for a second.

I don’t write this for sympathy, I write this for awareness of a horrible, dark disease we’re all only a couple of steps away from experiencing. It took me one incident on one evening in 2010 to almost wreck my entire sanity forever.

Don’t have sympathy for me, have sympathy and understanding for the people out there who are still going through what I describe below, and much much worse.

You’ll be glad to know I’m now 100% fine.

Sit down, and imagine something for me.

You’re sat down, minding your own business. You’re probably watching TV, like the rest of the world. Suddenly you feel a sense of dread come over you. There’s no particular reason for your feeling, but it feels exactly like you feel when you go to the edge of a cliff and look down. Or that feeling when you nearly get run over.

Your heart jumps. Then, beat. Beat. Beat. Thump. Thump. Now you can feel every single drop of blood thumping through your veins. Your head starts thumping. Your forehead starts sweating. Your hands start sweating. The backs of your legs start sweating.

Have you ever felt like this? You probably have. We all have at some point in our lives. Imagine for a second feeling like this every day of your life.

Think about that for a second. No really, go away and have a think. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Horrible, isn’t it? Now, think about feeling like that every couple of hours. Then think about how you’d probably worry about feeling like that. Then when you start worrying about feeling like that, you’ll feel like that again. Horrible, isn’t it?

For the best part of 6 months in 2011, I felt like this nearly every day. At my lowest points, I genuinely felt like I was at the edge of sanity: that all it would take to blow my fragile house of cards down would be a real disaster, not an irrational fear of nothingness.

Triggers

Every person who suffers from panic attacks have what’s known as a trigger, or sometimes several triggers. My trigger was heart attacks. Late in 2010 I went through a little episode where I drank way too much Red Bull, and my heart felt like it was going to smash through my chest.

For 3 hours in the early hours of a morning in December 2010, I genuinely thought I was about to die. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. My heart rate was through the roof, then it settled down again, then rose back up again. I was a sweating, jittery, terrified mess.

Ever since that day struck, my fear of dying from a heart attack had been burned deep into my mind, and it had scared me shitless.

The fallout

I was at my worst panic attacks when the episode had just happened. In January of 2011 I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts for more than 15 minutes. Any longer than that and I’d start thinking about heart attacks again.

“What if I died from a heart attack right now?”, I’d ask myself.

No faster than that thought had entered my mind, my heart would start racing, my palms start sweating and I’d be transported right back to the early hours of a December morning in 2010.

It was fucking awful.

A deep feeling of doom

Explaining exactly what a panic attack feels like is really difficult. I’d say you have to experience one to know it, but I wouldn’t want to wish that on you. I’ve experienced some pretty painful physical stuff in my life, but I’ve experienced nothing that comes close to the feeling of a panic attack.

The best way to describe it is a dictionary definition I read somewhere when I started researching it: a deep feeling of impending doom. Those 2 words—impending doom—look exactly how a panic attack feels.

The other way I can try to explain it is more dramatic but equally valid. You feel like what you imagine dying feels like. You feel like this is your final minutes on earth, that you’ve reached the end of what you’re ever going to achieve ((As of writing this I’ve not had a panic attack for over a year, but writing this bit is making me feel quite sweaty, and it’s not because I’m warm.)).

Putting up with these feelings every day for 6 months (that’s exactly 182.5 days fact fans) was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. Trust me when I say I’m being hyperbolic not for dramatic effect, it’s just because what I’m saying is true. There is no need to dress any of this up in hyperbole.

On the edge of sanity

“Putting up with” would have been putting my situation lightly. Surviving is probably a better choice of verb. My panic attacks became a viscous circle. To keep my mind off of worrying about having a heart attack I worked myself to death. Working yourself to death makes you tired, lose focus easily, and as a result makes you unhappy.

When I got unhappy, I started to have nasty thoughts again. I felt like had a malevolent force in my brain, clawing at my sanity whenever my mind was occupied with doing important stuff. I couldn’t be alone with my own thoughts, which meant I had to keep my mind occupied all the time.

I couldn’t do any of the following for longer than 15 minutes:

• Watch TV

• Read a book

• Take a bath

• Sit or lay down with my eyes shut

• Any other activity that didn’t involve much brain power

Mentally, I was a wreck. In the first month, I could feel my sanity tearing away, bit by bit. I have a strong will and I used every bit of it to cling on to normalcy. Meanwhile, at the back of my mind, locked in a drawer desperate to get out was myself telling me this was stupid.

Unfortunately, at the front desk, my mind was racing as fast as my heart, my whole body was sweating and fidgety, and I couldn’t shake the thought that I was about to have a heart attack any minute.

Medication

I couldn’t think quietly to myself long enough to work out how I could fix myself, but I was determined I was going to do it. All my life I’ve tried to let my body fix itself first before resorting to anything else, and this wasn’t going to be any different.

That’s not to say I didn’t start to look into treatment. At my darkest moments when I felt like I was genuinely going mad, I thought about and researched cognitive behaviour therapy, hypnosis and considered wacky magic potions.

Unfortunately I’m a man, and I still suffer from not being able to show weakness. Most men suffer from it, and I believe it’s still one of the principle reasons why so many men die of testicular cancer. Men in Western societies are portrayed as masculine lumps of meat that feel no pain, show no weakness and punch things. We can’t show our feelings easily.

Because of all that, and because I’m a stubborn bastard, after six months I started to plot ways to deal with what I was experiencing. By sharing my methods I’m hoping I might be able to help somebody else out there who’s reading this article.

Medication No. 1 – Exercise

At the height of my panic attacks I took up jogging. I didn’t take up jogging because I was having panic attacks, but that was one of the secondary reasons why I did. I knew I needed to lose weight and I thought I’d give something different a try, and that was running.

My trigger was heart attacks ((I’m still fascinated to this day how powerful our minds are. All it would take was for me to hear the word “heart” in a song and I’d start to get twitchy. I couldn’t watch any TV shows to do with dying, and especially nothing to do with hearts.)), so if I could prove to myself that I could run for extended periods of time without dying, then I’d completely disprove the thoughts I had in my head. My hypothesis was that if I disproved my worries, they’d disappear.

It turned out I was right, and my anxiety started to shrink fast. I started to gain more confidence in my own mind again. I first realised it when I started finding it possible to read again.

I know it probably sounds weird to you, but sitting down with a book and finding out I’d got lost in it for a couple of hours after months of not being able to sit with my own thoughts for even 15 minutes was an amazing feeling.

Medication No. 2 – Face your fear

Luckily for me I achieved this and the exercising thing all in one fell swoop. I started to research a lot into how people get over irrational fears. Even though I was suffering from anxiety, I was having panic attacks from the result of an irrational fear, so I presumed the same rules could apply to me.

For me facing my fear was relatively low risk. If—God forbid—you’re suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) it may not be as easy to face your fears. However traumatic it may seem to go through it again though, I urge you to try.

Another way I faced my fear was through just sitting quietly and thinking. I won’t call it meditating as such, but I’m sure some others would. The goal of meditation as far as I understand it is to achieve a feeling of clarity in your mind.

To do this, you need to circle around each of your thoughts in your mind, and truly understand what they mean. When I next felt afraid, I would sit down and face my fear. Why exactly was I feeling this way? What was the reasons behind it? Could I trace it back to where it all started?

From there, I started to become comfortable with what I felt, and it suddenly doesn’t become so much of a big deal anymore. I also found it a huge help to research a lot into anxiety disorders and other mental diseases.

Medication No. 3 – Start sharing your feelings (at least with 1 person)

I was lucky here as I had (and still do) a great girlfriend I could share everything I was feeling with. She was on the other end of the phone when I was going through my experience that lead to everything else, so it was easier to share things with her. I still won’t say it was easy: if she ever gets around to reading this article she won’t have realised until now the extent to which that night affected me.

Once I started to get more confident though I started sharing more with her. After that, I started sharing little details with other people. Once I’d started to share my experiences with others, a huge weight started to lift from my mind.

I only wish I would’ve shared how I felt sooner with people.

As I said at the top, I’m glad to say I’m now over panic attacks. I’m completely fine, and don’t suffer at all from them.

Anxiety disorders and panic attacks aren’t anything to laugh at. I can sympathise massively with Michael Bay. It takes a lot of guts to show your deepest fears like that, and I hope more people might sympathise after reading this.