Anxiety Support Group

Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...

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odd way to cope

hollymc7
hollymc7
I have not been a regular on here. But since I have been frequenting these posts, I have developed and odd, and not all too healthy way of coaping with an anxiety attack.

I have been okay off the meds, but sometimes I'll have a bad panic attack. SOmetimes, especailly when I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep, my mind/heart/breathing won't calm down. When it gets pretty scary, I find that throwing up helps.

It's bizarre. I don't actually have to throw up. My stomach has felt twisted and upset during and attack before, and I thought, hey, if I threw up my stomach might feel better. I had to force myself to throw up, and that seemed to help all the other symptoms too. I could breathe, i could calm down, I could sleep. It's so incredibly weird.

Obviously, forcing yourself to throw up is incredibly unhealthy. I only do it when I can't possibly take the attack. I've maybe done it once every two weeks-once a week, sometimes less often than that.

Grr. I don't know. It's like exchanging one bad thing for another, but it's helped me feel better, like nothing else. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
deleted_user
deleted_user
It does sound a bit bizarre. Maybe by you throwing up you may be distracting yourself from what is actually on your mind causing the initial attack. You might want to explore some other options when these attacks come like some breathing or image techinques. Find the trigger. Forcing yourself to throw up does not sound like a healthly alternative.
deleted_user
deleted_user
I have experienced this in the past. I thought I was the only one! It used to happen when I would have intense anxiety, just like you. I don't even know how it started. For some reason, I thought that throwing up would take my mind off of everything, and stop the pain, if even for a minute or two. I did talk to some close family members about it, and they helped me stop. I realized that I was using throwing up as a way to stop the pain. So now I do breathing exercises and talk therapy. I talk to friends, my boyfriend, and family to work through whatever it is I am having a lot of trouble with. I also used to talk to a therapist and am getting back into that asap. You can't jeopardize your health (and your teeth! the acid from your stomach can damage the back of your teeth from vomiting I have heard) with doing that to yourself. I hope this helps, to know you're not alone.
deleted_user
deleted_user
It makes sense to me and heres why. It is fairly physically traumatic to your body to throw-up. It causes several muscle groups to convulse uncontrollably, pushing them to an extreme and causing at least moderate if not severe pain. A few things will come from this. The first being the endorphins that are released from the pain and muscular trauma. The endorphins themselves will make you feel quite a bit better. Next, you have created and released a whole bunch of tension in a short period of time, that will give you a pretty strong sense of relief. And finally, you have burned off some excess energy, no doubt broken a sweat, that will allow you to (or force you to) relax because now youre physically exhausted.
But quite frankly, all of those same feelings come from having sex. I would highly recommend that over forcing yourself to vomit. Its much more pleasant and not quite as messy (in most cases).
And throwing up will hammer your teeth and damage your esophagus. I do not recommend it.