Panic

I’ve been having panic attacks since I was eleven years old. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. My mom took me to lots of different doctors, who administered lots of different tests. I went through x-rays, an EEG, a visit with a gastroenterologist, and countless chats with my pediatrician and then a therapist. The ultimate diagnosis was “free-floating anxiety.” Which sounded like an oxymoron to me. Anxiety is crippling, stifling, painful. Whoever paired the words “free” and “floating” with ‘anxiety’ had obviously never experienced it.

Since I was a pre-teen, I’ve learned a lot about my body and how it reacts to stress. My anxiety is still ‘free-floating’ which basically just means it’s unpredictable. While I don’t always know the triggers, I do now recognize the signs in my body. It starts with a knot at the base of my left shoulder-blade. Then there’s an achy tension right where my shoulders meet my neck. I feel a pit in my stomach, and it starts to grow until it becomes painful to take a deep breath.

At that point, I have a few choices. I’m about 8 minutes away from a full-fledged panic attack. If I focus on that, I will wind up in a heap on the floor, or in the back of an ambulance. If I try to figure out what’s triggering the anxiety, I’ll speed up the process.

I have medication that helps. If I wake up with that feeling (like I did this morning), I know it’s going to be a two-Ativan kind of day. But if it sneaks up on me, and I don’t have any chemical assistance available, I have to have some other tools. Oddly, taking deep breaths makes it worse. Deep breaths are painful and the more I feel like I can’t breathe, the more anxious I get. I need to breathe calmly, but using shallow breaths. I count the breaths. I wiggle my toes, because it takes my focus off of all the places that are tight and constrained in my upper body.

I read recently that anxiety and gratitude can’t exist in the same space.   Maybe it seems over-simplified, but there’s a ton of research on the power of gratitude, and I for one, am a believer. If I can shift my attention to all the things I’m grateful for, I can push away the panic, slowly but surely. I start with the big things; my family, my husband, my health, my home… but it’s more effective when I shift my focus to the small things. Early morning coffee. The warmth of wool socks. The feel of book pages between my thumb and forefinger. The smell of rain. The rhythm of my children’s breath as they sleep.

It doesn’t always work. But I’m grateful for the times that it does… and also for Ativan.