A Step by step Terror attack

Me at work, just days before I suffered my first panic attack in grand style

One thing I resent about 9/11 and the whole planes crashing Al-Qaeda buzz is that they stole the word terror.
Calling it a panic attack doesn't really come close to explaining the all consuming fear that washes over me like a wave.  When I consider how it feels,  terror is the only word that even comes close.  It is singly the most intense, scary, overpowering thing that has, and hopefully will ever happen to me. Absolutely terrifying.

To people who have never experienced anxiety on a major scale it can genuinely be difficult to understand how it feels. Even to the most sympathetic of people.

It changes a lot from attack to attack and from person to person, but ill try to explain how it generally feels for me.

First is a sudden feeling like something is not quite right, like someone is watching me.

Its surreal. Like I'm not in my own body.  Everything seems to be happening around me and I cant focus on anything.

Next I notice that my face feels flushed.  Initially flushed, but soon it feels like its on fire.

All of a sudden I feel like I cant breathe.  The sensation arrives like a freight train.  It hits me at a hundred miles an hour and as soon as I feel it, I start panting, breathing fast and shallow.  Trying to suck as much air into my lungs as fast as I can.
My head begins to feel light and I feel as if I'm going to faint. My fingers go all tingly and I can feel my palms getting clammy.
I become acutely aware of everything that is going on in my body, I can feel the individual hairs on my arms moving. I Can feel my chest expanding and contracting.

What happens next is for me the most traumatic part of the anxiety attack.
The initial sensation is like going over the top of the roller coaster.  I can feel my heart pounding in my chest and all of a sudden I get the sensation of free falling and as adrenaline takes over I start to lose control of my body.  My heart rate increases so quickly I feel like my heart is going to explode.  The walls close in around me and all of a sudden I'm out of control.

The only thoughts I have are negative.  I cant breathe. I cant survive this, I'm going to die.
There is no ability to rationalise, because my brain is in survival mode.
At this point I genuinely feel that I am as close to my animalistic instincts as I will ever get.
running completely on adrenaline.

Understanding why this happens is key to getting through.  Because once you can recognise the stages (it always happens in stages).  You can start to develop techniques to break the chain.  you can say "hey, I can feel my face burning up.  I know what that is,  Its anxiety".  From there you can learn to do things that stop you from moving on to that next step.
For me its usually getting up to get a drink of water.  Or moving around the room a bit.  Just to break the cycle,  and once that cycle is broken, its pretty hard to keep connecting the dots and keep heading down that road to a full blown attack.

I mentioned that its Animalistic.  This is because at the fundamental level, anxiety is sending your body a message.  saying loud and clear.  I'M FRIGHTENED.
Back in the days where a cave mans idea of a relationship was hitting women on their heads with a club and taking them back to their caves and fought saber tooth tigers.  The only time they really got scared was when something was going to hurt or kill them.  So as a natural defense our bodies developed a response when this fear was awakened.  Basically its like a switch being turned on, and it happens somewhere around the top of the roller coaster part, when the brain goes "OK I sense fear,  I'm gonna feed my body some adrenaline so what ever is scaring me will either be left in the dust or I will kill it".  This is known as the Fight or Flight response.   The adrenaline in our system heightens our senses and allows more blood to flow to muscles and vital organs allowing us to run faster and fight harder.  This could have been the difference between life and being eaten by that saber tooth.

As I learn to deal with this illness and the more of these attacks I have, its only stands to reinforce what I have learned.  At times I'm calm enough to sit there and ride out each stage one by one just to see how it feels (now that I have skills to deal with it) and funnily enough when I get to the point where the adrenaline comes and my hands start shaking.  There is a part of me what wants to run for the hills.  Which is strange, considering the other part of me is worrying that my heart is going to stop beating.  So maybe this anxiety stuff is only that.  Anxiety.

So I figure I should probably introduce myself now that I have your attention.

I'm a 27 year old male and I live in Auckland, New Zealand.  I'm generally a pretty fit and active person.  I have been married for two years and we don't presently have any kids.  For my job I work as a Marine Engineer and I work at sea for 6 months of the year working 5 weeks on 5 weeks off.  For work I'm primarily based off the coast of Australia.  So I fly between the two. On leave I play a lot of golf and fix up my old Mercedes along with all the usual stuff.
So now you know more about me and who I am, you can see how something like anxiety can play a big role in my life with me being isolated for half of the time.


The first month was the toughest.
When I got home I had no idea that what I was experiencing was anxiety.  I had been discharged from the hospital in Perth, Australia and thrown onto a plane home being told that there was no point waiting to get a diagnosis which would take a few days at the least. (real cool flying home in a packed out tube and thinking that you are going to have a heart attack at any minute)
So I arrived home tired and confused.  Actually maybe bewildered or swamped or completely out of my depth is a better word.
On the journey home I began to have trouble breathing.  Like I was constantly short of breath.  No amount of deep breathing would do anything to help except make me dizzy, which in turn would get what i later discovered to be anxiety cranking.  The only thing that I could do to make myself feel better at that point was to close my eyes.  It wasn't like an instant fix but when the other alternative I could for see at the time was to either faint or die, it seemed to be a pretty good option. It became my first real coping mechanism.  Even today its my last real line of defense from a full blown panic attack.  Lying down in a dark room with my eyes closed and breathing deeply.

So the first 3 weeks I was home were spent being diagnosed by various Specialists.  I had arms like a pin cushion from all the blood samples and IV lines they were attaching to me.  One specialist put me on a training bike hooked up to hooked up to a heart monitor and made me ride as fast as I could for as long as I could.  Trying to replicate what had happened to me earlier.  Another took and ultrasound of my heart to test its function.  Everything came back fine.  Then the final test I had the Doc strapped a heart monitor to me and told me to go about my business for 24 hours.  During this time I was at home alone for a while.  The palpitations started while I was watching TV.  I got scared and called an ambulance.  My poor wife came home to a note on the counter saying "At hospital, happened again, I'm OK" I was cleared in a few hours and went back home to try and relax.

A week or so later I received notification from my GP that all the tests that had been done came back either OK or inconclusive.. which, the good Dr explained is as good as OK.  I still felt like crap and was on edge a lot of the time.  However, stupidly I decided that it was time to celebrate that I was officially in the clear from heart problems.  So went to a friends place for a bit of a celebration on the wines.  This was the first time I had really had anything to drink since I got home and once I had a few in me I felt fine. In fact I felt better than fine.  I felt as if nothing was wrong.  So I kept drinking and eventually stumbled to bed in the wee hours of the morning.  I was back to normal, just like I was supposed to be.

The following morning I woke up with a bit of a headache and the familiar taste in the back of my throat of too much good pinot noir.  I decided to resume my normal life.  I made a cup of coffee (the first one since I had got home) and sat down to chew the fat with my mates.  After a few minutes I started to feel like I was on the outside looking in.  Like I was not in control and spacing out.  I started struggling for breath again and all of a sudden one of my friends commented that they could see my heart pounding through my shirt from the other side of the room.

Next thing I'm in an ambulance on the way to hospital.  3 Hours of sitting in the emergency room and I'm finally told that nothing is wrong.  No heart attack.

Now I was really starting to worry about what was going on with me.  If it wasn't a cardiac problem.  If the palpitations weren't caused by a physical problem then what could it be ?

I didn't feel depressed.  In my eyes I hadn't done anything overly stressful to cause anything like what was happening to me.  I had just been doing what i had always done.  Sure things had been intense as hell the last time I was back from sea on leave.  But I survived it.  In fact I was probably the fittest I had ever been before I got sick.  Was hitting the Gym almost every day when I was away and was feeling fit and healthy.

Somewhere along the lines my wife suggested that I go and see someone who might be able to get inside my head and maybe might be able to figure out what was going on with me.  I was too messed up to deal with it so she took care of tracking down a psychologist that was nearby and could take me on at short notice.
What followed was perhaps the most interesting and life changing thing that has ever happened to me.

Within the first 5 minutes of being in that room my psychologist had a pretty good idea for a diagnosis and come up with an action plan for getting myself back on the road to recovery.  The first thing she had me do was draw up a plan of what had lead me to where I was at that point.
What I put down on that page was a very humbling and scary sight.  Never before had I seen how destructive I was being towards myself.  How little time I was allowing for me ( and how much of it i was giving to other people).  It can be very powerful when you see how you live your life laid out in front of you.

I began to learn that what had happened had been a very long time coming.  I had Been a slow moving train wreck for the better part of 10 years.  Running away from things that I didn't like dealing with, ignoring my needs, hardening myself to the outside world, not acknowledging my emotions.  Eventually and I guess inevitably the train ran off the rails.

This was the start of my recognition of anxiety, from here I was at last able to a give a name to what was happening to me.  It didn't make it any less scary, but it did mark the start of my recovery.
Even at this early stage I had begun to establish some steps to look after myself.
1)  Alcohol is bad for anxiety.
2)  Not looking after myself is a recipe for disaster.

I have a bit of a rule of thumb now when it comes to alcohol...  For the amount of time I'm consuming it, I pay for it two fold the next day with anxiety.