When Panic Attacks
By Lauren Russell Griffen
One night seven years ago, I completely lost my mind.
I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep. Suddenly, my nerves seemed to catch on fire, my muscles became as stiff as steel rods, and my heart felt like it would explode. I clutched the mattress to steady the spinning room. I had three thoughts: I'm going crazy. I'm going to do something crazy. I'm dying. I was overcome by the urge to get the hell out of there--to jump out of bed and run out the door or crash through the window. But I couldn't move. I was paralyzed with fear--the same feeling you get when you step off a curb and realize a car is heading straight toward you. Only there was no car. The danger was all in my head.
Forty-five minutes later, it was over. At the time, I was convinced I'd gone temporarily insane, but a little research revealed a more probable diagnosis: panic attack. A panic attack is clinically defined as a powerful, inexplicable sense of terror that comes on without warning, peaks within 10 minutes, and is marked by at least four of the following symptoms: racing heart; sweating; shaking; shortness of breath; chest pain; a sensation of choking, nausea, dizziness, or numbness; chills or hot flashes; fear you're going nuts, losing control, or dying; and the feeling that the world isn't real or that you're detached from your body. I had experienced at least half a dozen of these feelings. No wonder I was ready to check myself into a psych ward.
Bring Out the Dread
panic attacks aren't as rare as you might think--experts estimate that more than a quarter of all people will experience at least one in their lifetimes. They often come on suddenly and without warning, though studies have shown that attacks are sometimes precipitated by highly stressful events. "In patients who have Panic Disorder [see "Uh-oh, Not Again," page 164, for more on the chronic condition], six to eight months before the first attack we tend to see not merely stress but stress caused by loss, whether it's due to a job change, a move, a divorce, or even marriage or pregnancy, which is a loss of your former life," says Reid Wilson, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the author of Don't Panic: Taking Control of anxiety attacks.
"When you experience a loss or too many changes too fast, it's easy to lose your grounding," says Pauline Boss, Ph.D., a stress researcher and therapist and the author of Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss. "You can't fix the problem, you feel out of control, and at some primitive level you can become panicked." If you're prone to panic attacks, your internal distress may continue to build as you go about your normal life until finally it overflows, sending your mind and body into a tailspin.
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