ANXIETY & PANIC ATTACKS

My chest went tight, feeling as though my heart was being squeezed between two fists, I felt a rush of heat go the entire way up my body as my face, neck and chest went purple and I began to panic. Unable to breathe, unable to speak, sweat dripping along my forehead and tears streaming down my face, I felt paralysed with fear, inhaling and exhaling faster and faster without any control over it. I tried harder to slow my breathing and take longer deeper breaths in an attempt to allow air into my lungs. Once I had finally started to calm down, I lay with a cold flannel on my head outside in the nighttime air in an attempt to cool myself down. Motionless, exhausted, tired, and emotional, I lay there until finally after what seemed like an eternity, my body returned to normal.

I've struggled with my mental health for as long as I can remember but always felt mildly grateful that anxiety and panic attacks never played a huge part in my depressive stages. I developed anxiety very late in comparison to all my other issues and it was only about 18 months ago when I had my first panic attack. There is something so incredibly difficult about anxiety that I still have not got to grips with. It is something you cannot define as it's different for every individual and it's impossible to explain or rationalise. I can't speak on behalf of anyone and my anxiety will be different to yours, but hopefully I can share a few thoughts on how I attempt, sometimes poorly, to deal with and manage it on a daily basis.

Anxiety has the ability to make me feel stupid, irrational, crazy, delusional, emotional you name it. It makes me feel like my brain is whirring at 1000mph, going round in circles, like their are voices in my head arguing with one another, replaying thoughts and actions, going over it and over it in my head and being completely unable to make any rational decisions. Some days my brain is quiet, even peaceful and others it can be like the M25 during rush hour, congested and overflowing.

Most days I am able to continue as normal, deceiving those around me and giving the impression and I am totally fine. I guess this is partly a defence mechanism as I don't want to appear weak in front of people, but also partly learning to live with the endless chatter in my head and shut it off to allow some sense of normality in my life. I find it really hard to talk about my anxiety to people who have never experienced it, because trying to describe it out loud makes you feel like you should be locked in some kind of mental asylum. What I have finally realised, and my god it's taken a while, is that could not be further from the truth. More people than you could possibly imagine or suspect have at some point gone through something very similar to you and talking about it will only make you feel mildly less insane and hopefully provide you with some comfort that you are not alone.

Having a panic attack can be one of the most terrifying experiences for a human, both mentally and physically. The way it makes your chest feel, the way it alters your breathing, the way it makes your brain go into overdrive and the way it leaves you feeling completely and utterly drained and exhausted. It feels to me how I imagine it would feel to die. I know that sounds overdramatic and rather morbid but each time I convince myself I really will stop breathing and my heart really will stop.

Although it never feels like it at the time, I'm lucky. I've only ever had a small number of panic attacks in my life. The first made sense to me, fuelled by alcohol and a very large crowd. Looking back on it I realise it wasn't either of those factors that were solely to blame, they were simply the catalyst which sped up the process and triggered the panic attack. I was already extremely anxious, already depressed and already feeling totally abnormal but prior to this I felt trapped in my own mind and body, as though I couldn't release my emotions any other way. The two following have been different, and much more recent. I have no way of explaining them and that in itself scares me and makes me more anxious. They make me feel like I am out of control and cannot rationalise why it happened.

As you all know I like to be in control, I like to know why things happen and need an explanation for everything, so you can imagine my distress when at a time I thought my anxiety was at manageable level, my body decides to go ahead and have a panic attack without my approval or knowledge first! That may sound ridiculous, obviously you can't get approval or knowledge before you have a panic attack but I like to think I know my body well enough now that I can sense when the next one will happen. Sadly it's not like this, they swoop in out of nowhere, destroying everything around you and explode when you least expect it, rather like a bomb or a misile.

What I describe in the first paragraph of this blog happened six weeks ago, just as the world really began to panic about Coronavirus. I didn't think for a minute I felt hugely stressed by such topic, as I have written in a previous blog post, I was living in some kind of ignorant bliss at the time, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I found myself alone in my bedroom on a Saturday night having a panic attack. I hadn't realised at the time but other people's anxieties about the virus were subconsciously rubbing off on me, and making me more anxious and panicked as a result. I found as I was lying on the floor dripping in sweat attempting to calm myself that the symptoms of this attack mirrored a few symptoms of Coronavirus; tight chest, a feeling of a drowning, struggling to breathe, boiling hot and flu-like. This made my panic worsen as contemplated dialling 111 to tell them I was dying. I was completely alone, utterly terrified and didn't have the strength to call anyone to help. Obviously as my body returned to vague normality the rational side of me knew I was not dying of Coronavirus and that I had simply had a panic attack, but I could not for the life of me understand why.

Since then sleepless nights have become quite a regular occurrence, sometimes waking in the middle of the night riddled with fear and panic, soaking wet with sweat and being unable to breathe. It's something that really scares me, and I don't usually scare very easily. It puts me out of kilter for days feeling confused, delirious and incredibly emotional, both sad and angry. I find myself frustrated I have no control over when it happens and totally bemused that my body has the ability to wake itself during sleep to remind me how fucked up I am. Thanks...

Ok, so I'm being harsh to myself, and if you're reading this with a feeling of familiarity, know this - having anxiety and panic attacks does not make you fucked up, or delusional, or crazy or mental or insane! It makes you human.

As I said earlier, everyone deals with their anxiety differently. It's trial and error really, learning what makes you feel better and what makes you feel worse. Somedays nothing helps and sleep may be the only option, but other days you feel like you're pushing back at the pain and fighting. For me, I run. It works better than any other exercise to fight anxiety. There is something so beautiful and therapeutic about running though fields or along pavements totally in control of your breath, your pace, your feet and your body. It is the one time when you can chose to disconnect from everything around you, from all human contact and be isolated with just your thoughts, or do the opposite and drown out the pain with music bursting through your headphones into your eardrums. There is a reason a lot of people cry running, it's not just a physical release, but an emotional one.

There a hundreds of other coping mechanisms to chose from, I love yoga, I love to sing, I love to read old romance novels which take my brain and mind into a totally different world where I can dream up soppy scenarios in my head that never happen in real life - yes we all know I'm a hopeless romantic! I love to write, putting my thoughts into words helps me understand why I feel the way I do - that's the reason I started this blog and it helps me in more ways than I ever thought possible. I'm not perfect, I don't manage to do these things every day, I cry a lot, I feel angry and frustrated almost all the time, I shout too much, and at times I feel isolated and different to everyone else in the world. It's not easy but each day is a work in progress, it may feel like you're alone and completely crazy but you're not. We are all different in incredible ways but so similar in others, and no one should ever feel alone with only their anxiety to talk to because there is always someone who will listen.

As much as it frustrates and scares me, I'm slowly coming to terms with my anxiety and the occasional panic attacks. It's not been easy and there are days where I wake up and for no apparent reason feel physically sick with nerves, racing thoughts, sadness and panic, but there are also days when I feel happy and light as air, energetic and powerful. Both although one is more painful to experience than the other, have taught me some valuable life lessons and built me into the incredibly strong person I am today. No one in life has everything, being knocked down is only going to make you stronger if you keep fighting, and at the end of it all you can feel proud knowing you battled every day to be the person you wanted to be, not the person your anxiety wanted you to be.

Lots of love x