Searching your way to better health: How I got rid of panic attacks.


Filed Under Overcome Depression, Personal Stories | Sep 2, MDT 12:37 pm

Years ago, I underwent a period of frequent and intense panic attacks. At the time, I had no idea what was happening to me. Eventually, after one particularly bad episode, I took a trip to the E.R room of a local hospital. It was late at night, and the doctor who saw me admitted that he wasn’t really equipped to deal with mental health issues. He tried to give me a diagnosis, but what he came up with was less than satisfying. He thought I might have been having a schizophrenic episode, and I knew that I most definitely wasn’t.

He asked me to wait until they could call in a psychiatrist. After several hours of dicking around the gloomy interiors of this rather decrepit hospital, a psychiatrist finally showed up — and she was absolutely, utterly, and completely terrible. She made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to be there, and after a few cursory questions she immediately asked me if I wanted any drugs. I told her no thank you, and then she basically kicked me out of her squalid little office.

Dr. Google Provides A Diagnosis

I decided that since these doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing, I’d have to diagnose myself. When I got back home, I went online and entered some of my symptoms into Google — shakiness, rapid heart beats, shortness of breath, and nausea. I started browsing through various conditions, and through a process of elimination I realized I was having panic attacks.

The simple act of labeling my experience immediately improved my mental state. I now knew what I was dealing with, which had the effect of calming me down considerably. Thanks to Google, I also realized that my symptoms weren’t limited to the ones I had typed in.

Recognizing and then defeating depersonalization

My most important discovery was that people who suffer from panic attacks often experience depersonalization. The moment I read that, I realized I had just found the key to ridding myself of my panic attacks.

Depersonalization is a rather unpleasant sensation. It feels like you’re floating outside your body, a spectator to your own life. As I read more about this ghost like sensation, I realized that this was the symptom which anchored my panic attacks. Before my heart started racing, before the nausea started setting in, before my breath started getting short, I’d always feel as if my mind was floating away from my body.

The moment I realized this, a solution to my panic attacks presented itself. Depersonalization is a perspective problem. Having had studied a little NLP as a teenager, I remembered some of the exercises I had done on shifting my point of view. In my mind’s eye, I learned how to look at things from a first person perspective, a third person perspective, and a floating perspective. Depersonalization only happened when my mind unconsciously drifted into a floating perspective.

This realization basically put a stop to my panic attacks. I no longer suffered depersonalization, because whenever I felt like I was floating away from my body, I’d just ground myself by shifting my point of view back to first person. This would short-circuit the rest of my symptoms, since I experienced none of them independently of that floating point of view. My shakes, my fast heart beat, my nausea, my lack of breath, all of that only happened after feeling depersonalized for awhile.

Even today, I sometimes catch my mind floating off, and with that feeling comes all those other symptoms. A simple shift of point of view and it all goes away. This doesn’t mean that shifting perspectives will eliminate panic attacks for everyone. Different people need different treatments. Understanding the anatomy of your attacks and the order in which your symptoms appear can provide you with clues for how to rid yourself of your condition, though I can’t offer you any guarantees. I only know what worked for me.

Not everyone gets a happy ending

I was lucky. My brief dalliance with NLP equipped me with some potent analytical tools. These tools, in conjunction with my Google-Fu, made it possible for me to conquer my panic attacks.

Some doctors warn people against the dangers of self-diagnosis, though I think those dangers are often overstated. It really depends on your access to quality health care. In Montreal, our doctors are overworked and our hospitals are understaffed. Had I had access to a competent doctor, I wouldn’t have turned to Google for my healthcare needs. Given the circumstances, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Since I wasn’t going to take drugs from a psychiatrist who barely examined me, I was forced to improvise.

In my case, Google turned out to be a better healthcare provider than the Canadian government.

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