Anxiety induced meltdown/shutdown/panic attack

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When I start feeling anxious it kind of feels like i need to stim and fidget and just move, but then I just dont. I dont know why. It feels like an urge. When the anxiety starts I feel like I need to have an outlet and if everything builds up enough I will have a meltdown/shutdown/panic attack or a mixture of those. Although I dont like having them and it feels horrible during them I know Ill feel better afterwards. It's like vomiting. You feel really bad and you know you have to vomit but you dont want to because vomiting is horrible. You cant stop it so you vomit. It takes a while to compose yourself afterwards but you dont feel as bad and you feel kind of relieved that you dont have to vomit anymore and that it's over.

Can anyone else relate?

I don't have panic attacks very often. But I know that feeling when you know it's coming. That fission rising up through your body. It's worse if I'm in a meeting at work and we're all sitting round a table and I can't get up and move around.

I've developed a technique of not trying to suppress the attack. I don't tense up and try and stop it. I relax into it and think, yeah body just over react, go on her at start pounding, and weirdly I start to calm down.

Although, when I'm at home and I can move around and burn up that crazy energy, I start crying uncontrollably.

And I don't feel better afterwards. I feel exhausted.

Alone panic attacks are different for me than in public panic attacks. I don't know why.

I honestly feel like very few of the things I experienced that everyone--including me--classified as panic attacks actually were panic attacks. They were mostly meltdowns or shutdowns. They can all look pretty similar, but they can definitely be categorized by how they felt in retrospect. The true panic attacks didn't allow me to feel any better afterwards; they had no notable triggers whatsoever and I felt worse than I had before afterward.

The meltdowns are exactly like the OP describes; I start feeling very fidgety and have to start moving to keep from completely freaking out, because I feel like I can't find where my body stops and everything else begins. They feel horrible, and depending on how long they've been building up, they can be dangerous and I end up hurting myself because I have nowhere else to put all that energy and emotion. I feel like absolutely nothing will ever be okay again and I may as well just die because there is simply no point. I completely hate myself and experience intense shame because I feel like I should be able to do something so this doesn't happen anymore--but generally trying to "do something" results in worsened meltdowns in the end, because usually the something I'm trying to do involves trying to "look normal." Trying to look normal takes an insane amount of energy, and I'm not even any good at it, so I'm trying not to try so hard anymore, haha. The vomiting analogy is a very good one. Ultimately I tend to feel much better later on, but initially I have a kind of "meltdown hangover" where I am very tired and dizzy; sometimes I get a headache, too. I have weird pulsating visual symptoms sometimes as well that actually make me wonder if there isn't enough blood getting to my head when meltdowns happen.

Shutdowns are like more internalized meltdowns. I still end up crying and getting very anxious and fidgety, but I can't speak and it feels like parts of my brain that allow me to talk and think aren't functioning properly. I will try to talk and can't make words come out. When I finally am able to talk, the words come out haltingly and my vocabulary is poor. It's very strange. Shutdowns seem to happen when I'm consistently trying to delay meltdowns, and they can be terrifying because if they're bad enough I start doing things I wouldn't normally do, like running away from wherever I am or whoever I'm with or impulsively doing things at random that could end up really hurting me or someone else. Thankfully I haven't actually caused significant harm to myself or others due to shutdown, but they really suck. I literally feel insane when I experience them. I've experienced laughing and crying fits that suddenly stop, like they're operated by some kind of switch. Before the really bad ones start, I feel this gradual silence overtake everything in my brain and I get this sense of dread because I don't know what's going to happen or how long it's going to last. A psychologist tried to diagnose me with bipolar disorder due to these episodes, but they are far too short lived to be mixed episodes, which is what she believed they were. It takes a long time to recover from the worst of these--sometimes an entire day or more.

I don't know if this will help you but I've found something that's helped me with my anxiety/depression. Just a bit of information that has helped to calm me down overall. It's a video documentary on Creation science and after presenting their evidence, they go into answering some intriguing philosophical questions. I'd encourage you to be open minded and check it out. Like I said, it encouraged me to believe that everything's OK even with the challenges we all face here on wrongplanet. It might help, you never know.

Here's the video: