Panic Attacks (Help pls)

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I had a panic attack today at my sixth form college which I was powerless to stop. Every time I gained some control my body fought back and my thoughts became so jumbled I just stumbled out and sunk at the bottom of the stairs, not knowing what to do. Luckily for me, someone else had a good idea and called a teacher who dealt with it from there and now the support staff know about me.

I have two questions, firstly if you have panic attacks what happens to you and how do you stop them?

For me I often get a warning sign which is chest pain and then my breath becoming shallow before I begin to hyperventilate. BY the time it gets to that I don't have control anymore and can not always respond to what people are saying. I am filled with a sudden intense fear as my body takes complete control and my hands and feet begin to tingle/numb and I can no longer stand, often curling up in a small ball and rocking back and forth with my hands over my ears. I lose my ability to make decisions and so often end up frozen where I am, even if it's a really bad place and I would usually know where to get help. My thoughts become jumbled and I feel like I am out of my body at points during and after, not fully in the present. After my hands and legs may shake which technically I can sometimes stop but it drains me so I just let it continue as I will already be drained for the rest of the day. Sometimes I can't speak and it's weird because I know my voice isn't gone but I just can't bring myself to speak, as if there's a block or something bad will happen if I do, I don't know how to explain it. Other times my jaw shakes so much I can only stutter and or slur if it decides to not listen to me. Those symptoms may be explained because I can get non epileptic seizure symptoms after a panic attack.

The only things I've found to help so far is drinking water which stops me hyperventilating and doing mindfulness but that's useless when my thoughts become jumbled, hence why I want more tips. It is really embarrassing to have ones in front of people so I often try to hide. Today that wasn't an option because I just started at the college so I don't know where anything is. For that reason tips would be appreciated and I'd like to know how others get them because sometimes it makes you feel lonely when you don't relate to others on it and I often get new symptoms that freak me out because I don't know if they are normal.

Thanks

I would talk to a psychiatrist if you have one, if not talk to your regular doctor.you may need medication

Sorry to hear this is happening to you, Ivpin. I can only agree with what others have said here. An occasional panic attack can usually be managed with strategies which I’ll list below. However, if you have four or more panic attacks in a month and/or your fear of another attack is disrupting your everyday life, it’s time to consult a mental health professional who specializes in panic and anxiety disorders. Both therapy and medication are effective in managing panic disorder and preventing future episodes.

Strategies for Coping With Panic Attacks


If you experience a panic attack, keep these facts and tips in mind, courtesy of Edmund J. Bourne, Ph.D., author of The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook, and Denise F. Beckfield, Ph.D., author of Master Your Panic and Take Back Your Life! Twelve Treatment Sessions to Conquer Panic, Anxiety, and Agoraphobia, to help get you through the episode:

*Remember that a panic attack poses no physical danger. You won’t faint, have a heart attack, lose your balance, fall, suffocate, or go crazy. You will not lose control of your body.

*Recognize and accept your symptoms rather than fight them. Intellectualize the situation by telling yourself that you recognize the symptoms and know they are signs of a panic attack. Though disquieting, tell yourself that the attack will run its course and resolve within a few minutes.

*Learn the early signs of a panic attack. Sometimes you can stop a full-blown panic attack from developing by intervening at the first sign of an episode and focusing on something else besides your body and feelings.

If a panic attack is under way, interrupt the cascade of panicky thoughts by repeating the words “Stop it!” aloud or silently to yourself. Then shift your focus to deep abdominal breathing to slow your respiration rate and relax your muscles so you can “flow through” the attack.
Johns Hopkins shares four strategies for managing panic attacks so they frighten you less, are less intense, and occur less frequently.

It comes on suddenly, without warning. Your heart races and pounds in your chest, you sweat, you feel short of breath, dizzy, sick to your stomach, faint even. You fear you’re having a heart attack or maybe losing your mind. You have a distinct feeling of unreality and, perhaps, a desire to run away and hide. You fear you may do something crazy or uncontrollable. Being in the throes of these feelings and sensations is terrifying and profoundly uncomfortable. But within minutes, the symptoms are gone (one way to know you’re not having a heart attack).

You’ve just had a panic attack. And now you live with the fear of having another panic attack, the dread of which can be worse than the attack itself. You may also be blaming yourself for allowing your emotions to run away from you. But the truth is that once a panic attack begins, your body is being held hostage by a cascade of physiological events — starting with the release of stress hormones such as cortisol — that are difficult to reign in. This doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

Why do we panic? Ironically, panic attacks most often occur during non-threatening, normal activities. They can hit when you’re walking down the street, sitting at your desk at work, or visiting with friends. The catch is that for some reason the brain misinterprets the situation as threatening.

Although the setting of a panic attack is usually benign, panic attacks commonly occur during stressful periods of life, such as when someone is getting a divorce, grieving a death, or moving to a new town. Stress, it’s believed, may create a physiological imbalance or allow an underlying genetic predisposition to panic attacks to emerge.

Did your therapy include only CBT?
Did you talk to your therapist about supressing your panic attacks and the cost of it?

How are your sensory issues? I most often have panic attacks due to sensory overstimulation and yes, I get overstimulated in situations that are "normal" for people of typical sensitivity. Supressing them in long run lead to very serious mental health problems.

What worked for me was acknowledging that some "normal" situations are extremely uncomfortable for me and taking care of myself - avoiding them if possible, dedicating time to preparations before and rest after them when a situation was unavoidable. Also, small sensory modifications like earplugs can make a world of difference sometimes.

There are several different states in panic attacks. The most severe is called tonic immobility.

When a person is in a traumatized state, they physically lose their ability to talk. One of the things that Bessel van der Kolk showed when he first started to do trauma research with functional MRIs is that when people are in the trauma state, they actually shut down the frontal parts of their brain and particularly the area on the left cortex called Broca's area, which is responsible for speech. When the person is in the traumatic state, those brain regions are literally shut down; they're taken offline. Some Aspies report that during a meltdown, they have difficulty processing speech. It is like hearing white noise. Others indicate they lose their ability to think in words. [When the brain collapses down into the core brain, it is becoming a preverbal brain like that of an infant that hasn’t learned to speak.] Rather their brains revert back to thinking in terms of pictures and video clips and when they try and communicate, their words come out as gibberish. Others indicate they lose their ability to process all sensory inputs. Sometimes during a panic attack, the whole body goes limp and the person will collapse on the floor.

1. Panic attacks occur when your body is overloaded with stress. If you can learn to vent the stress energy, you can minimize panic attacks. Sometimes your body will do this automatically. One method of venting stress at your core is to shiver. When you said "After my hands and legs may shake which technically I can sometimes stop but it drains me so I just let it continue as I will already be drained for the rest of the day. Other times my jaw shakes so much I can only stutter and or slur if it decides to not listen to me." So what is happening here is that your body is venting stress energy. This approach can be performed thought a strange form of exercise. I would suggest reading "The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process" by David Perceli.

2. Another method for venting stress is Deep Breathing Techniques. Our lungs take in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The shortness of breath that occurs during panic attacks and anxiety is often caused by a change in your normal breathing pattern. Typically, we are not conscious of our breathing. When panic and anxiety occur, our breathing may become more shallow and restricted. Instead of filling the lungs with full, complete breaths, we take in quick short breaths.

Both panic and stress researchers have examined the fleeting effects of the increased carbon dioxide levels. Elevated levels produce breathlessness, dizziness, and minor anxiety in most participants and panic attacks in those with or at risk for panic disorder.

Research into panic attacks showed that: Notably, the researchers found that patients' carbon dioxide, or CO2, levels (using a portable capnometer to measure CO2 collected from exhaled breath) were in an abnormally low range, indicating the patients were chronically hyperventilating. These levels rose significantly shortly before panic onset and correlated with reports of anxiety, fear of dying and chest pain.

One technique for controlling panic is to implement deep breathing techniques. Force the body to take very deep slow breathes and vent the carbon dioxide buried deep within the lungs. Deep diaphragmatic breathing can be performed as follows:
1. Take a long, slow breath in through your nose, first filling your lower lungs, then your upper lungs.
2. Hold your breath to the count of "three."
3. Exhale slowly through pursed lips, while you relax the muscles in your face, jaw, shoulders, and stomach.

3. Another method to come out of a panic attack is called the Vagal Maneuver. The stress and trauma in Aspies can produce panic attacks similar to the panic attack triggered by tachycardia. Tachycardia is an abnormal medical condition that produces a rapid heart rate in the heart's electrical system. Doctors will sometimes use a technique called the vagal maneuver to slow down the heart rate by stimulating the vagus nerve.

How does the vagal maneuver work? Simply put, they affect the vagus nerve, a long nerve that runs from your brain to your belly. It sends signals to the atrioventricular node, a cluster of cells at the bottom of your heart’s upper right chamber that helps control your heartbeat. Think of it as an electrical relay station. It takes signals from the sinoatrial node and slows them down before passing them along to the lower chambers. The result: A slower heart rate.

As the body collapses into a full-blown panic attack, it does it in stages. One can sense a panic attack about to strike. So just before one enter a deep state called tonic immobility where a person collapses and becomes non-verbal, one may be able to mechanically trigger a vagal maneuver to stop your racing heart and pull your body back into control.

One of the techniques used to produce a Vagal Maneuver is called Cold Water Treatment or Cold Stimulus to the Face. This is done by placing an icepack or a bag of ice or a washcloth soaked in ice water on your face for 15 seconds. Or you can immerse your face in icy cold water for several seconds. It might also work to step into a cold shower or a cold bath. This creates a physiological response similar to a person being submerged in cold water (Diver’s Reflex).

This is the reason why drinking cold water helps you sometimes. Ice water on the face is better.

4. Another technique is Avoiding Triggers.

This website is suddenly not letting me reply to certain comments as it keeps on crashing so I'd just like to thank the other people who gave me tips and explanations for why the symptoms happen. Not knowing why my body reacts this way makes it more scary so armed with this knowledge I hope it helps me cope a little better.

I actually came back to the site to post a similar question.

I'm sorry to read you're having to endure such panic attacks, especially at College for others to see.

Definitely relating to how the panic and anxiety physically take hold. The only way I can describe how it affects me is the sort of chills you might experience when you have a fever or really bad cold, and the only way I've been able to shake it is to let it pass, which at times can prove inconvenient.

Recently noticing with myself and my current circumstances my anxiety has almost depersonalised me in a way, though I'm unsure how much of this is my depression. These days though, I have been able to manage the latter. Noticing within myself how I'm a lot more withdrawn and quiet around my closest family and friends as opposed to before.

I've had Counselling for a good decade of my life, as well as being on and off various Anti-Depressants and Anti-Anxiety medication with little to no long lasting effect. Even anxiety management and mindfulness classes do little to help, relating to you and how the words and thoughts jumble around in my head. Distraction and breathing techniques don't seem to work, and I even tried taking Aspirin as a short term relief for such anxiety and panic I've recently experienced.

Has anyone had experiences with smartphone apps such as Headspace and Calm? And if so, have they helped at all?

Sorry if I seem like I've hijacked your thread at all. I'm hoping other answers, and suggestions can be found here

Pinching your nose and dipping your face in a mixing bowl of cold water activates your dive reflex and slows your heart rate. When I was having panic attacks with uncontrollable jerking limbs, it helped.

Good luck.