Do your anxiety symptoms last for days/weeks?

yea mine are horrible

Hello everyone. I've commented on this post before but I've already forgotten when and what I had said. 3 years ago in february of 2017 I had a panic attack, and then afterward, I developed what I would call catastrophic panic disorder and agoraphobia which lasted years. It all started because I felt a skip in my heartbeat which I couldn't explain back then (I found out years later I have a hiatal hernia and those muscles spasm), which got worse and worse and I was convinced something was wrong with my heart. And then one day I got home from work and I thought I couldn't breathe. I went to the ER, they checked my heart and found nothing wrong, put me in a catscan, checked everything. I came home from the ER in an absolute state of terror. I laid in bed for almost 36 hours, feeling this strange sensation in my chest, hyperventilating. When I managed to get out of bed, it was for brief spurts of time. I would first anticipate that something was wrong and I was surely going to die and then fear would come so intense. I would feel everything. Pain in my chest, in my arms, tingling in my fingers and toes, like i wasn't getting enough air, like I was dizzy, like the light was too bright, my body was shaking. I remember it now as a living nightmare. Anxiety runs through my family and I had never experienced it up until that point. But to me, something WAS wrong and the doctors couldn't find it and I was going to die without question. I spent a long long time in that state. I would have upwards of 15-20 panic attacks a day, I went to the ER maybe 6 times until I was in debt thousands of dollars. I missed so much work I eventually lost my job for it. I didn't get prescribed any medication nor did I want to take it, because I believed that I wasn't experiencing anxiety but an actual invisible ailment that was slowly killing me.

After years of this experience, I want to share with you what I learned from all of that fear. I learned first and foremost that fear is ONE of the most powerful forces you can ever come across in life (Joy and love are more poweful than fear). I'm not making a baseless statement when I say that. The tricky thing about fear is that often, if you're in an incredible state of fear or prolonged fear, it can cause you to experience things that aren't real and it does this in a myriad of ways. When you are afraid of something wrong with your heart for example, all the muscles of your chest are on high alert, they will tense up, often to the point of ripping or tearing some of their fibers, which makes you feel lots of pain in your chest (one of the primary locations of physical pain when you're going through anxiety). This can happen to any part of your body that you're most worried about. Your heart will beat faster and lots of adrenaline in your body can exhaust and drain energy from other parts of your body, resulting in lots of aches and pains all over, even headaches as your blood vessels constrict or redirect blood to both damaged or overworked sections of your body and also in panic states - to vital organs. In states of panic, your digestive system goes on pause. Prolonged states of panic means that your food isn't digesting properly, which will make you get stomach aches, bad bowel movements, even more aches and pains inside of your body. Tension in the chest will create lots of airpockets where gas will go that its not supposed to go, causing even more sharp pains and stuff all around your body, even when you breathe. Less blood to your digestive track and extremities like your hands and feet will make those parts of you tingly or achey in the morning. The tension in your chest will restrict full breathing, making your body have to change to the new "normal" of oxygen levels in your blood, which is worsened if you're hyperventilating or forcefully breathing very very deep all the time. Other processes in your body will also have to try to compensate, like blood chemistry, amounts of sugars, where the energy is coming from, the after effects of all that adrenaline in your system day after day.

If you're agoraphobic, your legs and joints may stiffen from having your muscles super tense without walking and exercising enough. Waste particles and carbon dioxide will accumulate in different parts of your body, in your joints. You'll also start to lose vitamin D from not going outside often. You're not absorbing the right amounts of nutrients from food because your digestive system is taking a hit. Your brain also gets beat up, experiencing high amounts of stress. When in panic, your eyes and ears and other senses are on high alert, being overworked, resulting in sluggish feelings and thoughts, low optimism, lesser joy, a more extended burnout kind of feeling. Emotionally you'll experience all sorts of chaos. You may be scared all the time. Just as your body can adapt to new things, so too does your emotional state. You may still have highs and lows, but your highs might be super fast and compact, laughing at a joke here and there or smiling only a little watching a funny video, but then an unbalance in how intense the lows are, which will make your emotions kind of go wobbly and chaotic cause you need to experience balance there too.

The process always begins with thought. If you are like me and find that when you wake up after sleep is when you have/had no anxiety at all, this is actually one of your keys to understanding the effects of fear. Also, if you find that when you're thoroughly distracted by something - a game, an activity, a movie, a conversation, a task, a moment of forgetfulness - and then, NONE of your symptoms are present? That's a key. In a sleeping state you're not thinking and worrying and so you might wake up each morning and feel alright up until you leave bed.If this is the case, take time to really think about how your body can sort of settle back into the norm when you're not thinking, which will help you to realize, not only can you come back from fear in a single night, but fear always starts in your thoughts. You'll expect to feel a certain way, your senses will all focus on that part of your body, and then you start experiencing stuff around that area. Or you may be on a lighter-alert kind of mindset, just paying attention to your whole body in general and the first ache or pain or unusual sensation that comes sparks fear.

If you want to defeat that kind of fear, you'll have to understand how your thoughts lead you to it. This at first might scare you, because you feel like you can't control your thoughts and its like a wildfire that you have no ability to stop. But you actually can, you have more power than you realize. When you're in that state of fear, the power and intensity of that fear is actually YOU. So when you feel that ache or pain, do your best to just totally accept that its absolutely normal for you to feel it. Maybe you're repairing from extended states of fear or stress. Your body's going to hurt while its fixing itself up and returning to a state of balance. You may have sore or damaged muscles. If its around your chest, your ribs and bones could be sore too - these bones are made to be flexible, but under stress they're bending and tightening a lot more than they normally would, which can make the cartilage inflame as blood comes to start those repairing processes. Really think about what such pain or discomfort can mean and resign yourself that IF it is in fact something serious, you're going to know it. And if you take a chance and let it slide - and afterward, its okay? Then you realized the truth of it and you release it - relieve yourself of that heavy burden.

The next step to conquering fear is one of the hardest, and that's to take a step forward even when fear is really telling you that you're not ready. For me with my agoraphobia, the simple thought of leaving my house was so terrifying that I couldn't even leave unless absolutely necessary - and I had a panic attack every time I did. But I would rush back home or feed my fear by saying yes, yes i'll stay home as much as possible or minimize my time outside. Let's be honest, you SHOULD take it slow, but make progress further and further. Patterns start via repetition. When you think "i'll do this" and fear says "no you wont" and you say "okay" you start a pattern and the more you repeat that process, the stronger and stronger it becomes in you. You have to break it the same way that you made it to begin with, by going further and further each time, the opposite way. When you think "i'll do this" and fear says "no you won't", you have to say "i'll go a little bit" and then the next time "i'll go a bit further". Rest assured that each step, no matter how small, builds up. And if you do "suffer the consequences" so to speak, having anxiety/panic when you leave, don't let this push you back into a prison of fear. You can endure it. Think of the changes you already made to succumb to fear. You're already enduring so much. But make it something of your own choice, and not out of fear.

And the final part of defeating fear is to get used to it. And what that means is, when you have a panic or anxiety attack, all of those sensations, thoughts, the whole experience. Get used to it in a way that you recognize it, that it starts to become repetitive, that it starts to become predictable and boring. Fear always must come at you in a new way, with surprises, from an unexpected angle. Its the unexpectedness or the unfamiliarity of a fearful experience that makes it so frightful, the surprise of it. When you already know what to expect, it loses all of its power entirely. You may have a certain trigger and it always hits you a certain way, but you're almost always hoping that it won't happen and when it does, its doing something unexpected by happening anyway. When you come face to face with fear, without fear, saying "yea i know what i'm going to be feeling" and then you feel it just as expected, some of that energy will be lopped off. It may be slow at first, but bits and chunks will add up and one day, you're going to go out there expecting it, and its not going to come at all.

For us, for people who live trapped under a great deal of fear, in high states of anxiety, panic. We live thinking very negatively about life. We tend to believe, there are 2 forces, but this one force (fear) is always going to be stronger and more powerful and win every single time. But think deeply on how ridiculous this is. That one force will always win above the other. We tend to think, its gonna get worse and worse and worse. And often we see that it does in fact get worse and worse and worse. But truly, is it so crazy to think, it can get better and better and better? If it can go one way, then it can certainly happen the opposite way. We don't often think of such a possibility, but its undeniable. And what's even better about it is that you don't have to believe it, but it WILL happen for you. It might have been getting worse and worse and worse, but it WILL get better and better too. You only have to open your eyes to see it.

Believe that whatever state you're in right now, you're going to move on from it. You've already come so far. Keep moving forward.