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...
Could you have a panic attack without the heart racing/palpitations? Lately I've been confused about it, because I have all the symtoms except the heart racing. I still feel as if I'm having a heart attack. Also, I feel as if I'm going to faint. I get very dizzy and it scares me. I thought I was making progress but truth is I don't think I am. I started taking sertranile and lorazepam only when my anxiety is really bad. I want to learn how to control it. I'm been struggling with anxiety for 7 months now. I honestly forgot what normal feels like. I'm just constantly in fear and I feel overwhelmed. I feel I need tk educate myself more about anxiety because there are things i still don't understand.
symptoms, you will have some and not others. You might even have different symptoms from one panic attack to another. My symptoms vary by bow quickly it happens. They are different when the anxiety builds over a few minutes vs what I call a "flash attack". One minute your fine and then the panic comes on quickly.
The important thing to remember is that all of your physical symptoms of anxiety...whether its a racing heart, or jelly legs, or shaking hands and dizziness...those aren't really symptoms of fear. Those are symptoms of adrenaline. Your fear and negative thinking causes the adrenaline, and your adrenaline is what causes your physical symptoms.
People often say..."but I wasn't even scared when I started having those physical symptoms so that can't be true."
But when you have an anxiety disorder, your constant negative thinking means you have a steady stream of extra adrenaline in you all the time. Your brain is so used to you thinking the worst and being under stress, that it decides you need more adrenaline than the average person to keep you safe and alert and it basically ups your dose.
And all that extra adrenaline makes you hyper aware....thats its job. Its a biological design that was meant to keep you alive and it works very well. And when you are extra alert you notice your bodily sensations more and you zone in on feelings and sensations that you have always had but you are now very "aware" of. And they feel strange and odd, and you start to key in on them and overanalyze them and then because you are such negative thinker, you start thinking something bad must be going on, so then you start to feel fear which makes you make more adrenaline which makes you feel more symptoms and your fear/adrenaline cycle will continue to the extent that you allow it depending on how much you freak out or don't freak out.
Anxiety is a good thing that is being interpreted as a bad thing in every person that has it.
Anxiety is simply your brain responding to your thoughts and your stress and your negativity, exactly as you command it to do. Its like a superhero that shows up at your door to protect you from the stress in your life, but you see the cape and think he is a weirdo and think he is CAUSING the stress in your life, so you hit him with a baseball bat. And he keeps coming back every day to try to help you and you keep hitting him with that bat and he has no idea why you hate him so much when he is just trying to help you. And if you would just get your stress level under control and heal and change the way you think and respond to negativity, then he wouldn't feel the need to keep knocking on your door every day to save you and he would go away and leave you alone.
Hopefully at least some of that made sense. That is my belief about anxiety and what helped me get through so maybe a little bit of it will strike a chord with you as well.
I always suggest folks rule out physical causes before medicating it. If you have the MTHFR gene mutation, low folate or B12, your thyroid or hormones are off, you can have anxiety. So getting all that checked can be a good idea. You may be able to treat the cause and not just the symptoms.
If you treat the underlying issues, often the meds work better too.
There's a great book called, The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook" by John Bourne. http://amzn.to/1gceolq
It explains a lot about anxiety and provides you with some terrific ideas to work through it.
There is a large community of folks dealing with this so you're not alone. There are tons of answers. It's just about figuring out which combinations work for you.
Good luck!