welliewellington
08-11-12, 20:50
Hi everyone, I'm not sure if anyone will find this of interest but I wanted to post my experiences of panic attacks and how I overcame them in case it is useful for anyone.
I used to get quite bad panic attacks that made my heart beat really fast and me feel like I was going to be sick. I am an emetaphobe so this would terrify me more and I'd get into a really bad cycle that would be hard to break. The only thing that I could do was sit somewhere cold and literally not move until the feeling went away.
When I went to uni I had a bad experience one day where I hadn't got enough sleep and felt really ill as a result and had a bit of a panic. After that I started to get really scared of not having enough sleep and send me off into a panic attack. Soon it got to the stage where everyday I would be assessing myself to see whether or not I was tired and even getting up the slightest bit early would set me off for the whole day even though I had had enough sleep the night before.
I had some counselling through the university which didn't really help that much, but I bought a book called "Understanding Panic Attacks and overcoming fear" by Dr Roger Baker. It is a very thin book, and basically what he said was that the best way to stop having panic attacks is to stop being scared by them. His advice was to experiment on yourself by doing the thing that you fear and 'proving' to yourself that the thing that you are scared will happen as a result of your panic attack doesn't actually happen.
Obviously for me this seemed impossible being ill as a result of anxiety is all to common and I was terrified that if this ever happened as a result of panic, it would make the situation all the worse. However, once I started work and had to be in a number of meetings and not wanting to let anyone know that anything was wrong, I once found myself in a training session feeling desparately uncomfortable and starting to panic and wanting to escape. I excused myself to go to the loo, but then obviously had to go back inside where the panic started again. It sounds like a nightmare situation, but I suddenly had a breakthrough moment where I realised that since there was literally nothing I could do to make the feeling go away, I would have to just put up with it and guess what? Nothing bad happened and eventually the feeling went away when my body realised that there was no real danger. Since repeating the experience over and over, I stopped worrying that I would panic at all and so the panic went away.
I still get ocassional attacks, but generally I can feel one starting up and say to myself to just get on with things and ignore it and it never flares up into a problem. Sorry that was such a long post, I just wanted to be able to share my experience with someone else. For anyone who hasn't come across this book, I would recommend that you read it. His method sounds terrifying and I know that I certainly struggled to put it into practice until circumstances forced me into it, but in the end it helped me so much.
I used to get quite bad panic attacks that made my heart beat really fast and me feel like I was going to be sick. I am an emetaphobe so this would terrify me more and I'd get into a really bad cycle that would be hard to break. The only thing that I could do was sit somewhere cold and literally not move until the feeling went away.
When I went to uni I had a bad experience one day where I hadn't got enough sleep and felt really ill as a result and had a bit of a panic. After that I started to get really scared of not having enough sleep and send me off into a panic attack. Soon it got to the stage where everyday I would be assessing myself to see whether or not I was tired and even getting up the slightest bit early would set me off for the whole day even though I had had enough sleep the night before.
I had some counselling through the university which didn't really help that much, but I bought a book called "Understanding Panic Attacks and overcoming fear" by Dr Roger Baker. It is a very thin book, and basically what he said was that the best way to stop having panic attacks is to stop being scared by them. His advice was to experiment on yourself by doing the thing that you fear and 'proving' to yourself that the thing that you are scared will happen as a result of your panic attack doesn't actually happen.
Obviously for me this seemed impossible being ill as a result of anxiety is all to common and I was terrified that if this ever happened as a result of panic, it would make the situation all the worse. However, once I started work and had to be in a number of meetings and not wanting to let anyone know that anything was wrong, I once found myself in a training session feeling desparately uncomfortable and starting to panic and wanting to escape. I excused myself to go to the loo, but then obviously had to go back inside where the panic started again. It sounds like a nightmare situation, but I suddenly had a breakthrough moment where I realised that since there was literally nothing I could do to make the feeling go away, I would have to just put up with it and guess what? Nothing bad happened and eventually the feeling went away when my body realised that there was no real danger. Since repeating the experience over and over, I stopped worrying that I would panic at all and so the panic went away.
I still get ocassional attacks, but generally I can feel one starting up and say to myself to just get on with things and ignore it and it never flares up into a problem. Sorry that was such a long post, I just wanted to be able to share my experience with someone else. For anyone who hasn't come across this book, I would recommend that you read it. His method sounds terrifying and I know that I certainly struggled to put it into practice until circumstances forced me into it, but in the end it helped me so much.