Davit

Or anyone with more insight then I have

I was reading your blog and I noticed that you’re trying to find the trigger as am I. I have determined that when in bed I will say “I think I am going you have a panic attack” and then I do. One thing pulses me is why do I keep saying these words one day I did no self talk while I bed and did not have an attack. I also challenged the thought above and I came up with 7 other sentences that would trigger an attack. So using Occam's razor(philosophical term) which states instead of finding an answer for every sentence I find one answer for all sentences. The answer I came up with is that it is anticipatory attacks. When reading though the sessions I think I remember the session saying there is a thought perhaps a behaviour and an sensation and hen a thought and then an attack. So I noticed that when I said this triggering sentence I had a sensation of a foggy brain. Unfortunately I went to a CBT before joining this site and he taught me a breathing technique similar to this web site that should with practice stop the attack. This was both good and bad in that at one point I had full control over the attacks and reduced any of them to less than a minute. But I know realize (perhaps rightly or wrongly) that I was reinforcing the trigger sentence by noticing the attack trigger sensation and then assuming I was going to have an attack and I would immediately start breathing to stop the attack. The two previous days when I said I was going to have an attack I recognized the sensation (foggy) that indicated that I was going to have an attack. And as the site says are you sure you have to have an attack after the sensation. This led me to two successful days of saying the trigger sentence, and then getting a foggy sensation, but I managed to stop it there and not have an attack. Until today I woke up and said the sentence twice and was able to stop them as before. Then I don’t know what happened I can’t remember saying anything or having any sensation but I just burst out and had an attack. Of course I used to treat this as a bad experience trying to find what I did wrong, but know I am changing this experience to a more positive thought as to what can this teach me. As Socrates said an unexamined life if not worth living, to which one of his students said, do you know yourself now? And he replied I know that I know a little more than someone who hasn’t examined there life. So to get to my dilemma I had the attack and I have had so many and now that I don’t have the typical thoughts that the typical panic attack is supposed to have, like I going crazy, I am going to die. What I noticed that I was saying is why the heck did I fail this time, and tempermental lingo (I will explain in a moment), was ever time I could feel I bit of pressure in my head I go angry, then I tried to start box breathing and it attack got larger in intensity and I got angrier the attack continued and the pressure started to go on my left side of my head, and I got mad at that, I kept trying to thing what can I say to stop it. This is how much the attack does not scare me I am able to visualize my happy space and calming space neither of those worked and again I got angry. At this time I probably gave up trying to do anything and just watched it until I decided it had enough. I go to an anxiety group and what tempermental lingo means is the angry feeling we associate fear. Like why cant I stop this, I must be defective because I can’t gain control, I am ashamed of my normal human imperfections, all of which can be coined in another way but the premise is that anger can have the same sensation as anxiety. And as the author tells it the anger during an attack tells the person how long and how much he must suffer from this attack. So how ever you want to catalogue my negative thoughts I believe they have the same affect. So my question is I was just looking at session 1 and it says if you go looking for the attack (or sensation) you are likely to find it. Which is what I did today before I had the attack I was feeling the top of my head looking for heat (because that the way it feels after an attack) only I was looking for some consequences to my first two triggers that just produced a foggy feeling and there was none. This astonished me because I had the second foggy feeling for quite some time and I could not believe that there would be no consequence from it (typically dizziness is consequence of an attack and head pressure). So another question is why do I keep say these sentences when I know there is no danger and I know they trigger an attack? But I also think if I don’t somehow beat this in another way then to stop saying triggering sentence then I give the sentences power over me. I noticed that you were looking for the trigger and in your attacks do you have any suggestions as what to do with mine.

Dizzy

Sunny

Thank you for your advice on how to make the positive thought more reinforcing. Thinking about them and adding a visual aspect to them is better than just thinking about them alone. I am a very visual person with an active imagination for being able to catastrophizing. When I first started school they noticed that I could not read and write, but they kept pushing up in grades until I was in grade 6 and could barley read. All through my early grades I was forced to leave class and go into a private room and try to read out loud to an adult who was supposed to be helping me. All I can remember is every time I read I was told that, it was wrong. I think this is where I stated to develop negative thinking because I couldn’t wait to go to kindygarden, but once I had a reading problem I did not want to go to school ever again. At this time they were going to send me to the ranch a school for people who couldn’t learn and probably would end up in a trade (and I am not saying there is anything wrong with a trade because I enjoyed woodworking). At this time my mother went berserk and demanded that they test me, and so they did. The next thing I know I going to a special school for the learning disabled and the teacher there must have known me better than I did, because she helped me by not making me read to her she chose the books for me to read and I figured it out for myself and went about four grade levels in one year. So I went from being an idiot to expectations of me going to university which I did. I am not telling you this story for sympathy I am telling it to show how young I started learning negative thinking. Perhaps the situations are different for people but maybe we all start at an early age. So along with anxiety attacks I have developed anxiety to writing, reading, and spelling things that are required for my job. But one interesting point they never told me my IQ but they did say that I was in the top of imagination and abstract thinking. Both of which can be used very successfully to develop anxiety and for catastrophizing.  So in conclusion I was not asking for your age because I am too much of a gentleman to ask a women her age no mater how young or old she is, I was just trying to say that I had developed negative thinking at a young age like you and had not started to try to change me thinking until about a year ago.

Dizzy

Red

I noticed in your reply you mentioned exercise hyper tension. I have recently discovered that when I exercise I get pressure in my head and then later tension, just as if I was having a panic attack (but I am not). So I went the GP and told him about my experiences and he did blood test and took my blood pressure and everything was fine. So I asked him if taking my blood pressure when I am at rest is the best way to determine if there is a problem from my exercise experience (I specifically asked would it not be better to measure my blood pressure after or during a workout).  And he said that if your blood pressure is fine at rest then it should be fine during exercise. To further this opinion the panic centre session 1 mentions that you can get the exact same symptoms as anxiety from exercise, anger etc. So I am wondering how did you determine that you had hyper tension from exercise and did you experience the same thing I did (sensation like an attack). I know we both are not doctors but I keep wondering if my doctor took me seriously and did the appropriate test or am I just like everyone else with panic attacks and anxiety and experience sensation just like an attack from different thing (things other than a panic attack). I am very interested I what you have to say on this subject.

Dizzy

Davit

You are a truly a caring man as I can see from your post you narrow in I my problem and then you give different advice to Drew to help him with his specific situation. I think that one of the things that happened to me from all my anxiety is stop caring for anything or anybody else. I believe that this is a sort of defence mechanism in that if you don’t care about much (except for yourself) you can’t have anxiety over someone else’s situation that is close to you. I have read that what you think is your greatest strength is your weakness and what you think is tour greatness weakness is your strength. How does this apply to me, while I took all the anxiety symptoms and suppressed them down with tension in my body I thought that this is how a man should be to show no fear (until it eventually caught up with me by expressing itself as more and more tension in my body to the point where I exploded). What I thought was my greatest weakness anxiety turned out to be my greatness strength I eventually showed me that I had led a life of denial and lost the ability to care for things. And until recently I never talked about my fears with anyone before, so my fears caused me to open up to people and sympathize over others who share this affliction or any other affliction. I think one of your greatest strengths is to put yourself in another man’s shoes and walk a mile.

Dizzy