A physically induced panic. (My Experience of Anxiety and Panic Attacks)

Name: Bryn Pearson

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Product:	My Experience of Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Date:	07/09/01 (455 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none whatsoever

Disadvantages: panic, inability to cope, traumatic fits of panic, the total imcomprehension and misunderstanding of others.

I am delighted to have a chance to share my experiences on this subject, I hope they will be of help.

Back in my teens, I suffered a range of health problems, some due to poor diet (binge and starve habits.) and some inexplicable - I was prone to fainting fits (now identified as low blood pressure due to not enough salt) and I was also prone to panic attacks. Some of these would occur when I was intensely emotional, but most were happening during periods of physical activity. I visited my doctor, who told my that my problems were entirely psychosymatic -by which, he indicated he felt I was inventing it to get out of PE. (I hated PE, but I was also obliged to give up dancing, which I loved.)At school my teachers eventually stopped trying to make me do games on the grounds that I spent more time hyperventiliating, panicking and looking like I was going to faint than I did doing anything else. I was lucky there.

I didn't actually enjoy being unable to run, jog, swim, dance or do any of the other activities that matter to me. I hated feeling trapped by my body and so set about doing what research I could into my problems, and studying what hapened to me to induce panic attacks. I was determined to find some way of getting over or around my problem and it was clear that I wasn't going to get any help from my doctor. It was largely due to a stroke of luck that I got my answer - a few paragraphs in a biological basis of behaviour textbook that I chanced upon at Uni cleared it all up.

For some people, a release of lactic acid into the blood stream causes the body to release too much adrenaline and go into panic mode. Lactic acid is produced when muscles work anaerobically - without oxygen. A bit of careful study proved, to my mind that this is the case with me. I can do quite a lot so long as my muscles are working aerobically, and as soon as I start to feel the strain of going into anaerobic work, a burning sensation starts to form in my
chest, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to breath and I start to panic as my heart rate goes through the roof. Testing this took a fair amount of self awareness and a willignness to suffer a few panic attacks, but long term it has proved well worth doing.

I did not bother to take this insight back to my GP, as I doubted that he would be at all receptive. What I did do, was to start applying the theory to how I exersize. By only working aerobicaly, I have gradually been able to build up all of my muscles so that I am now reasonably fit, and able to do a reasonable amount before I risk inducing lactic acid. It's taken about five years, but it's been well worth it. I can now fight with a Viking re enactment group and not have to spend half of my time lying on the floor desperatly gasping for air. I still struggle with more intense activities, and I have bad days when any activity seems to make it hard to breath, but mostly I'm on top of it now.

Appart from the obvious practical applications for anyone in the same boat, there is a second important piece of information to take away from this. We tend as a culture to divide up body and mind, to see mental disorders as somehow being different from physical ones. Wrong. The mind and the body are all part of the same system, run on assorted chemical substances. If one isn't working, neither is the other. A panic attack, whatever it's cause, consists of a set of real, actual physical expereinces - these are entirely real. The tendancy of some doctors to treat them as imagined is both misguided and unhelpful. A panic attack happens because your body over responds to something and releases too much adrenaline. The human body can learn inappropriate responses (as anyone who has ever studied conditioning will know.) a panic attack is a response that your body has learned, perhaps wrongly, to a situation that is percived as threatening or dangerous. If you have some bad experiences -
for example I read one opinion in which a lass said she had a bad expereince on a bus and is now afraid of busses - although the bus was not the cause of the problem, her mind and body have learned to associate busses with danger, and so react accordingly. These become self fulfilling, with the fear of the panic attack contributing no end to the actual attack when it happens. You fear the fear, the fear grows, and on it goes.

I was lucky in that my panic attacks have a controlable physical element and that I have been able to overcome them largely on my own. If your trigger is emotional or environmental, it is a lot harder to cope with. However, anything that has been learned can eventually be unlearned - there is hope. It would just help if people were a little more open minded aboutt he problem and prepaired to treat it as real.

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