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Panic Attack of a Different Size

Panic and anxiety attacks can be different for everyone, but these are how mine play out.

By Brooke NPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Some people don’t understand panic attacks, or even how real they are. Some people understand them too well.

When they started happening to me years ago I actually had no idea what was happening. Little things would set me off and my family wouldn’t understand why I was freaking out over it so badly.

Well to start when these things happen, it’s not about what set it off. It’s a whole load of things piled up over some time.

I’m really good at dealing with situations and being perfectly okay with everything. It doesn’t freak me out until everything at once comes flooding in.

My panic attacks happen usually after a long day of school. Sometimes nothing bad even happens that day, just by the end of it I’m so overwhelmed by people and what everyone is doing. I get an aching feeling that I just NEED out, I NEED to get home as soon as possible.

Sometimes it starts in the car, just tears that I have to keep whipped away to drive. Most times I get home, luckily no one is home when I get home, and I immediately just start bawling. It’s just uncontrable tears.

Then my mind flicks through absolutely everything even slightly bothering me in my life and exaggerates it. I push it down on myself and make myself feel like crap without meaning to.

What that does is it makes me cry even more. So hard that before I know it, I’m hyperventilating. I can’t breathe. I feel like tearing my skin off, exploding, laying down and never moving, as well as getting up and moving around, all simultaneously.

At this point is usually when I can bring myself back and stop myself before it gets too bad. I’ve figured out how to control it and calm myself. Sometimes I have to use my inhaler for my asthma to help. I breathe slowly and then I subconsciously block out everything that was bothering me just until I can calm down and actually deal with it. And I do feel better after the cry.

But, when I can’t stop it, it gets scary. I start shaking uncontrollably. My limbs go numb. My face and teeth and just everything starts getting buzzy and tingly like thousands of needles or bugs, like it’s severely falling asleep. And with my hyperventilating, I start losing my vision and my balance. So if I’m not already on the floor, I’d fall down. Unable to lift my head back up or move much of my limbs.

I’ve never completely blacked out from any of this yet. Mostly cause it terrifies me and forces me to a stop. But I’ve been close many times. I have to wait for all my feeling to come back and slowly but surely come back to normal.

There’s a number of things that trigger this to happen. Some main ones definitely are things like: losing or breaking something important to me, feeling abandoned or like I’m losing everything (figured out abandonment is one of my worst fears), stress over many things that I put on myself, like school and band and work and volunteering and everything attached to those things.

I’m constantly pushing myself to be the best or do the most. I also fear failure so to me I have to do amazing in school and it’s a constant stress to keep myself “good enough” to my standards. I have many things that make me feel like a “failure” and it’s really easy to trigger that in me. Even the smallest most irrelevant thing to someone else is heartbreaking to me. So that’s a big part of stress and these attacks.

No matter how many times I go through this. No amount of words will describe the experience. Some may understand for they may get some of the same feelings. Some people have different ones. It just depends.

I just wanted to give a glance into mine for other people to relate to, or to learn about it. Because yes, these are real things. And no, we can’t always control it.

panic attacks
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About the Creator

Brooke N

A young girl here to share about the things I love and/or know greatly about. I would consider myself a huge animal lover, a geek, and a small artist.

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