Diane's Story of Overcoming Anxiety and Panic Attacks

One night Diane jolted awake in a state of pure terror. Her body had locked up. She tried to call out and nothing came, because she couldn't pull in enough air to make a sound. She stumbled out the back door hoping the open air would help, gulping for breath that never seemed to arrive. For the next half hour her heart slammed against her ribs while her thoughts raced in circles. Heart attack? Was the next shallow breath going to be the last one she ever took? Only after she finally settled did she wake her husband, who promised they would see a doctor the moment the sun came up.

The next morning she sat across from her family doctor and laid it all out. He took her blood pressure. He listened to her heart. Then he asked whether something had been weighing on her mind. The question irritated her, frankly, because it felt beside the point. She had come in with a racing pulse, a choking sensation, and waves of fear, and here he was asking about her feelings. She wanted a physical explanation. He asked again anyway: was anything bothering her?

Yes, as it turned out. Her marriage had recently come apart in a mutual separation, leaving her to raise her kids on her own. A new relationship had started around the time she got pregnant with her second child, and that one had ended too. The worry over how she would keep two children fed and housed sat on her constantly, and the panic attacks came back, several a month. The fear of them grew so sharp that she dreaded going to sleep. Then they stopped confining themselves to the night. One hit her in the middle of a bright afternoon. Another arrived while she was walking through a shopping mall.

She fought all of this quietly, telling no one. Keeping up the appearance of a steady, unruffled person mattered to her, so she hid the attacks from the people around her. Months passed with no relief. Eventually she typed the words into Google, half out of desperation, and found thousands of strangers describing almost exactly what she had been living through. She read their accounts. She tried the methods they described. Slowly her reactions to stress started to shift.

The approach that worked best for her went by the acronym A.W.A.R.E. The first A stands for Acknowledge and Accept: admit that the panic and the stress are present, along with every feeling riding on top of them. W is Wait and Watch: observe the state without rushing to do anything about it. The second A is Action: do something that brings on a sense of comfort and calm. R is Repeat: keep cycling through acknowledging and accepting, watching, and acting until the calm takes hold. E stands for Expect the best: redirect what you brace yourself for, away from more pain and toward the good things still ahead.

For Diane this process cut her suffering down sharply. Reading how other people had moved through the same ordeal, then putting A.W.A.R.E. into practice, gave her something to hold onto when the fear rose. She has kept raising her children, now with far less anxiety riding alongside her. (Anonymous Contributor)