I have been suffering from what my doctor has diagnosed as anxiety attacks for over 12 years now. I am interested to know if anyone else has come across anything similar.
I am 38 years old and since I was 26 I have been having these attacks. They differ from any other attacks I have heard about in that they are triggered by nightmares or bad dreams. They never ever develop while I am awake. I have a dream and wake up and immediately know that something is wrong. I then will show some or all of the symptoms of an attack. The closest thing that I can describe it to, is being in shock. I suffered from shock once when I fell off my motorcycle and cut my leg quite badly and it feels exactly the same. My heart races, all my senses are going at 100mph and I experience huge swings in emotion from crying to laughing uncontrollably. These attacks can last anything up to 5 hours and are always at least an hour long. Gradually the feeling wears off and then I feel like I could sleep for weeks. The worse attack saw me taken to hospital as the person I was with was unsure of what was going on. However, as I have had them for so long now I know how to minimise the effects. I basically do exactly the same as you would for a patient in shock. I lie down, keep the lights low or off and talk to my girlfriend (I usually talk complete gibberish most of the time, but also find myself thinking incredibly clearly the next minute). I have found that sticking all the lights on in the house and trying to be active is the worse thing to do even though I feel like acting in that way as my senses are racing. I don't have these attacks very often (probably once or twice a year) and my doctor has prescribed me beta blockers in the past which I only briefly took.
Obviously, the length of the attack really scared me at first as I was convinced that I had gone mad but, as I say I have gradually learned to know what to expect.
Can anyone shed any more light on this sort of thing.
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