panic attacks with no physical symptoms

[bekw89]

Hi does anyone else get panic attacks with no physical symptoms? Mine is just a thought that I can't breath and I begin to panic over it but my body doesn't respond?

Thanks

[AlexandriaUK]

When you say it doesn't respond, what do you mean, no rapid heart rate?

[bekw89]

Yes, I just get a panicked mind but the heartrate, shaking etc I experienced two weeks a go doesn't manifest. Could my anxiety slowly be fading?

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yes, it sounds like you are not responding with a full attack.

Are the thoughts perhaps more triggers than attacks? Are they intrusive thoughts?

[bekw89]

Hi there, yes this has just happened again to me. Trying to get to work and my mind was racing mainly that i'm overwhelmed and going insane and thoughts linked to the DP/DR i've been having. Currently sitting on the car park of the doctors i've got an appointment. The mental is worse than the physical in my opinion. Has anyone else had this?

[MyNameIsTerry]

Are you saying that your thoughts are that you are losing your mind? If so, are these thoughts that you consciously create as in ruminating or do they just come to you without you thinking about them?

[bekw89]

Rumination definately,and just a sense of unease. Any advice?

[Richard1960]

Rumination definately,and just a sense of unease. Any advice?

Yes try to shift your focus away from your anxiety and focus on something you like,take deep breaths and relax.

If you can try and shift your mind to something pleasant and not focus on your symptoms you will be part way to decreasing how you are feeling now.:)

[MyNameIsTerry]

OK, so not intrusive thoughts of psychosis, schizophrenia, etc. Just checking as those are common in OCD, but I think we probably all have cognitive thoughts that we are losing it, especially at high anxiety or low mood stages.

The sense of unease is like a background anxiety thing. This can take time to resolve because its part of being able to relax more and not stay on edge. Relaxation exercises, visualisation, Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) Mindfulness, etc can help with that. This one can also be a learnt behaviour issue in that if you have these disorders longer term it starts to feel the norm to be anxious so it takes time creating a new belief that it is ok to not be anxious.

With rumination things like Mindfulness can help as aside from learning to be non jdugemental about thoughts and accepting things it also teaches you how to pull your mind away from areas you don't want it to stray into. In Mindfulness of Breath, you re-use the breathing anchor which means tou focus on your breathing (little muscles between ribs, visualise your breath entering/exiting mouth & lungs as a colour, the rise and fall of your chest, etc) which distracts you away from the thoughts or physical sensations again and then you can go back into the stage where you watch your thoughts. So, in learning this you could then stop your mind racing or ruminating by using an anchor or one of the many other things it teaches you.

Otherwise, you could try distraction techniques. Some people find using written methods helps them e.g. journalling, Thought Records in CBT, etc. Sometimes getting it on paper seems to make it part of the physical world and stops your mind churning it round & around.

[bekw89]

My only symptom is unfortunately now a racing mind, which I know I need to control. Just come out of the doctors and they are going to test my thyroid.

---------- Post added at 09:46 ---------- Previous post was at 09:32 ----------

Hi Terry, I wouldn't call them intrusive thoughts but they could be I will begin to think I feel weird abnormal etc and this will continue, then i'll panic about reality and about how I feel etc. It's just a weird spiral of negative thoughts. The doctor said that some people do just get mental anxiety with no physical symptoms so this was a bit reassuring.

[MyNameIsTerry]

If you consciously start to think you feel weird/abnormal, then these wouldn't be intrusive. Intrusives just pop out at you from your subconscious. For instance, you may be walking down the street, look at someone and a thought pops into your mind from nowhere to harm them. Thats one of the OCD themes, one I had for a while.

So, if you can say that doesn't happen, it won't be an intrusive thought trigger.

What is it that makes you think you feel weird/abnormal? Is it a sensation in your body or something you look at on your body or just a general feeling that you can't place?

It does sound like there is a trigger process that leads to the DR issues.

[bekw89]

I feel overwhelmed by my surrounding or more realisticall I fear I am going to feel overwhelmed. Trying to calm down, I know i've thought myself into a black hole basically.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Right so if you fear that you may become overwhelmed you then start to panic over it, check things, look around, try to detect sensations/feelings, etc and just end up bringing it all on.

I would say thats a pretty classic one with panic/anxiety. It doesn't have to have an autonomic trigger to it, we can start it consciously because of our core belief problems or Cognitive Distortions, or just insecurities really.

If thats how its starting then it seems like you need to be able to accept that it may or may not happen and that you may or may not be overwhelmed. Another way is to tell yourself that you are not overwhelmed and challenge it with positive evidence which is more the CBT way.

If you want to try this the CBT way, a Thought Record is a good approach. Its a form that you will in with your thought and then you write the evidence for your thought actually coming true. Then you oppose it with counter evidence as to why you won't get overwhelmed or how even if you feel it, nothing bad happens, it can't harm you, etc and you finish with a new positive thought. It's something you could try but obviously it takes repetition for it to really work for many of us.

The other way I would say would be more the Mindfulness way or acceptance. These take time to but can help greatly with these types of straying thoughts.

[bekw89]

When you say cognitive distortions what kind of thing do you mean? Do you think it's possible that my anxiety, because it's got no physical symptoms to focus on is creating fear of quite literally life? I think the disconnected feeling anxiety brings on is making it worse as though it somehow confirming my anxiety. If only I could think positively for a few minutes and really believe it I know I would feel better.

[MyNameIsTerry]

These are the Cognitive Distortions that can drive our problems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion

Wiki is accurate, the match the CBT ones I had from a charity I used to go to.

What I meant by mentioning them is that you could see a problem and start to magnify it, minimise the positive/rational, catastrophize, generalise, etc. I'm not saying that you are but it's a possibility to explore in trying to understand what is causing this and in panic/anxiety cycles we tend to employ these negative thinking styles hence beating it means tackling these too or at least being aware of them so we don't fall into further traps.

Anxiety can latch onto all sorts of themes. There are certainly people on the DP/DR board with a deep understanding of these issues and post about how they feel like they are even living a dream, the only person to exist, feel they are leaving the planet for somewhere else, etc. I've never felt much of that so perhaps it's worth seeing what you can find on there for further understanding?

Fear of life is something I can understand as a GAD sufferer. I've wished myself dead many times out of desperation.

Sometimes people go into DP/DR when things become too much. There are other mental health disorders such as Dissassociative Disorders where this does infact happen or even some people can have Non Epileptic Seizures (NES). These seem much less common though thankfully. I've spoken to a guy on here with OCD who goes into DP/DR periods because his anxiety rises so he feels a trigger first and DP/DR is his outcome.

Feeling positive is hard when these things come. Its takes a lot of practice so don't be too hard on yourself.

[bekw89]

I completely agree, I see my thought cycles like this

-do you feel weird if yes,panic!
-if no, why don't u feel weird there must be something
-I suppose reality is weird
- what's weird about reality?
- all of it and there is no escape!

Every day this week you could replace 'reality' with anything ...breathing etc.

So while I wait for someone to ring me with a councilor i'm going to read up on CBT and Mindfulness and plan a way out of this ridiculousness. Thanks again for all your help. BTW I am scared to go on the DP/DR section of the board because I think it will be triggering, but when i've plucked up the courage then I will.


Also am sorry to hear you felt that way with your GAD, what were you most frequent fears? And do you consider yourself recovered now?


Thanks

[MyNameIsTerry]

No way, I'm way off recovered in my eyes. But I'm a million miles away from my worst point which was sitting on the sofa afraid to wash, brush my teeth or any other thing we take for granted let alone the bigger stuff.

When I developed full blown OCD, courtesy of Duloxetine, I was afraid of going mad (I knew nothing about OCD then), I was afraid I would live the next 40-50 years doing the same things in the same order at the same times everyday as my OCD was quite bad and ruled my days so that they were identical and loaded with touching routines. I was simply afraid I would go on feeling anxious all the time and not be able to recover. Literally fear of fear.

That's ok, but thanks, I appreciate it. I think many of us go through those points where it becomes so overwhelming or we get some low level depression that doesn't last and the normal thought processes we tend to have can be that we just want a release from it. It's not that you want to die or anything, you just want it to end. Sadly, it's just not that simple.

It's worth starting CBT & Mindfulness. There are free CBT online programmes around (known as CCBT, see NHS Choices or NICE where they mention them, NHS Choices is easiest to find). If you want to give Mindfulness a go, follow the link in my signature as most of the stuff on there is free and there is even an 8 week MBSR course. MBCT is the combination of CBT with Mindfulness which came from the UK. Professor Mark Williams is one of the founders and his free downloads are in my thread.

So, you are searching or scanning for somethign that is "off" so you can use it to confirm you should panic. If you can't find it, you try to create something because you have a core belief in play telling you that you should be X (which for many of us is "you should always feel anxious, you should not feel ok") and you end up with some distortions e.g. catastrophizing over no escape, maximising that all reality is weird and minimising the possibility that it is not weird, ignoring proof it is not weird and generalising because you use your one opinion with challenge that it's all weired, etc.

The fact you have no real theme and it can use anything seems that it is more about feeling you must be anxious and can't be anything else as that is wrong./weird Is that possible? If so, thats a core belief style issue that has developed. If so, I think a lot of people will understand that. I can remember going through that as I started to recover and have better days that I would worry were weird, felt alien, etc and just bring the anxiety back with questions like "is this how normal feels", "what is this strange feeling", etc when you need to be accepting it for what it is and letting it just happen. This gets easier in time as you have more better days though and you learn they are ok.

[bekw89]

So glad to hear you are not feeling that way anymore and are feeling better. That sounds like a very dark place to come out from and well done for doing it, I can see why you are very knowledgeable on all this and your posts are always really useful.

Do you take any medication at the moment? I am trying to do this med free which is the best route for me as I am overly sensitive to drugs.

Also can I just send you a virtual hug :hugs: as I think you have hit the nail on the head with that theory. I am not used to feeling ok, but will get there i've been so on edge constantly for weeks my brain hasn't caught up yet I am going to take this as a positive. I've also finally made steps to getting a councilor, who knows I might come out of this phase of anxiety even healthier than before I had it.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Thanks, it's still a challenge but it's not as intense by a long way.

Yes, I currently take Duloxetine and in my original breakdown I took Citalopram which I came off about 6 months before my relapse. I struggle badly with onset side effects so when the relapse came I was dreading it but you just have to adopt the attitude that side effects are likely and its either stay as bad as this or risk being worse for a short while and then there is the possibility of improvement. I held onto that one every day.

:hugs:back too! If you have trained yourself out of feeling ok, it will take some time to retrain yourself to feel ok so just go with it as best as you can and try to stop analysing it as it just beings the anxiety back around. I've heard this from people on here and at the charity walk-ins I used to go to.

If you had one specific theme there could be a different reason but switching between constantly with the same issue might mean a core belief driving it at a deeper level so it just picks anything to bring anxiety back on with.

Counselling is a good idea. Yes, you could could out of it better, I think in some ways we always do as we learn about how our minds work and have more empathy/compassion for others going through this and other disorder/illnesses.