I feel tired, so very tired. I want to go to sleep and I can’t. I wish I could curl up and die. Apparently I’m not allowed to though. I have friends that care about me and at times like this they show it. I’m grateful for
that, but sometimes I wish they’d all go away and leave me alone to die peacefully. I feel like I’m drugged; dopey, tired, lethargic, listless.
I’m coming down from a shocking anxiety attack that has lasted a few days. I haven’t eaten in a couple of days now and I’m still not hungry. I haven’t slept for several days either. When I try to sleep, all I can do is lie in bed with thoughts running through my head. Horrible thoughts that I don’t want to have. I try to push them aside and think of more pleasant things, but the bad thoughts keep seeping in, like water leaking into a cracked glass bottomed boat. Every noise makes me jumpy and irritable at first, and eventually I end up so tired and fed up with it all that I could have a genuine dangerous threat thrown in my face and I wouldn’t care. I zone out and stop thinking properly. Nothing makes sense anymore.
At the height of an anxiety attack, I can’t breathe properly. I pant rapidly like I’ve been running a marathon. My heart rate and blood pressure go through the roof. My stomach muscles tighten and cramp painfully. My heart feels like it’s about to explode. I feel like I have a huge lump in my throat, my throat constricts, and I have trouble talking. My head pounds like someone hit me with a baseball bat. I vomit anything that is in my stomach, and anything I try to eat just comes straight back up again. I shake like I’m freezing cold. I can’t feel anything but fear and a strong desire to have it all go away.
As it starts to build up I can’t sit still. When it reaches a certain point, trying to sit still, breathe slowly and meditate, actually makes me worse. I end up feeling like I want to run away screaming or even kill someone. I have to be constantly doing something, but I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, or even seconds, at a time. However, if I don’t calm down by exerting my frustrations, if whatever is triggering it doesn’t go away or get better, it can end up overwhelming me. When the fear goes beyond my mental ability to cope, it’s like my mind switches off. It’s almost like something inside my head just gave up the fight for life. At this point, suicide becomes a serious risk. There is no longer any survival instinct within me, I’m desperate to make the sensations I’m feeling and the thoughts I’m thinking go away, and I’m not functioning properly to think of any kind of logical reason to not kill myself.
Anxiety is caused by fear, which is a natural reaction to danger. We normally deal with it by fight or flight responses. We either run away or fight off the danger when we can’t retreat. During an anxiety attack, the fear is often caused by something we can’t react to like that. There is nothing to run away from or fight against, except the fear itself and the thoughts triggering it. Someone that knows what the trigger is might try to find something that will counteract it. For example: if they are having an anxiety attack because they are being bombarded by illogical thoughts that their partner might be cheating on them, they might try to contact their partner for re-assurance that everything is okay and they are still loved. If that isn’t forthcoming for any reason, it can make the anxiety attack a lot worse. The worse the anxiety attack gets, the more desperate the sufferer gets to find a way to stop it. In the previous example, it could lead to endless phone calls, messages, emails, and even turning up at really inconvenient times – like at work in the middle of an important meeting - begging for attention, which can become very upsetting for the person on the receiving end, especially if they aren’t sure what they are expected to do. This can strain inter-personal relationships, cause social embarrassment, and create all manner of social isolation problems.
Everyone feels anxiety at one time or another. Stage fright is a perfect example of it. In very young children, separation anxiety is a common problem. Any man, woman or child can suffer anxiety for any number of reasons. But as soon as the situation that causes the anxiety has gone, most people relax and the anxiety goes away. When extreme and part of a mental illness – which again, any man, woman or child can suffer - regular anxiety seems like a walk in the park in comparison. If regular anxiety was a goldfish, the type of anxiety I’m talking about here would be a Great White shark – and it certainly feels like you’re swimming in wide open ocean, alone, with that shark circling you until it is hungry enough to eat you!
There are a number of mental illnesses where anxiety is a symptom, including severe phobias, and some people suffer anxiety as a mental illness in itself. PTSD is one mental illness where anxiety is one of the more obvious and severe symptoms, and it can be very extreme indeed when it takes hold. An anxiety attack can last for minutes, hours, days and even weeks on end. It can also be triggered off by the most seemingly innocent and simple things. Fortunately, being brought out of one is easier than say, depression. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do though. If you’ve ever tried to cheer up someone suffering depression, or tried to cheer yourself up if you are suffering from it, you’ll know all too well that it just doesn’t happen because someone said, “Cheer up!” With anxiety, simply saying, “Relax, it’ll be okay” doesn’t do any good either.
When someone is in the midst of an anxiety attack, the best approach is usually to get them to talk to you and try to tell you what the problem is and how they are feeling and why. Depending on the severity of their anxiety, their state of mind at the time, and how much they are in-tune with their state of mind and what has triggered them off and why, they could make perfect sense, or they might not. Once you have some information that as to what might have caused the anxiety attack and why, you may be able to figure out how to ease their anxiety.
Doing or saying something that might “confirm” or support their irrational fear is the worst thing that can be done, as it will only make the anxiety attack worse. Pre-occupying someone with anxiety to think and talk about something else is good and may bring them out of it. Or it might just delay the anxiety attack and as soon as you leave it hits them again. But it is worth a try if you can’t think of what else to do. The best thing though, is to find a way to remove whatever is causing it. This might require pre-occupying them until something more can be done, it may mean coaxing them to take a certain action, giving them reasons why their anxiety makes no sense and appeal to their sense of logic, or in a worst case scenario, calling for mental health support or even an ambulance.
If you suffer from anxiety, finding out what triggers it off and avoiding or learning to face those things will go a long way towards avoiding becoming overwhelmed by it. When a trigger can’t be avoided and learning to deal with it has been too hard to do, there are some things that you can do to avoid it getting worse than it could otherwise get. The earlier you catch the anxiety attack, the easier it can be to control. If you feel one coming on, try to take a step back from the situation, breathe deeply and very slowly, try to use positive logical thoughts and ideas to counteract the negative fearful thoughts in your mind. If you can calm yourself enough to re-enter the situation, do so and take your time. Be a fly on the wall for a little bit and just quietly observe the situation and let yourself slowly get used to it before you try to interact with it. If it starts to overwhelm you a little bit, step back and start again. If you can find an understanding person to talk to about it, someone you trust to not do or say anything to make it worse, by all means talk to them. If you have to call a councelling hotline, do it. If anxiety is a re-occurring problem and you haven’t done so already, seeking help from a mental health professional can be a good place to start learning how to cope with it. In extreme cases there are medications that are available to assist in overcoming anxiety as well.
(June 2008) (
