living with anxiety

That's exactly how my panic attacks started in my late teens - I was horribly and embarassingly travel sick on a 6th form school trip in a minibus - in front of the only teacher I ever had a crush on!

I didn't know they were called panic attacks at the time, all I knew was I didn't dare eat before travelling and I was always worse at the start of a journey - I must have been hyperventilating as my breathing would go shallow and rapid and I'd get tingling in my fingers and lips. This would gradually get worse until my lips were stiff and numb and my hands rigid and clawed, and I couldn't speak. This would eventually pass - I suppose my system couldn't go any further without causing me to pass out so my breathing would get deeper and the life would return to my extremities.

That was in my teens - I am now almost 50 and can remember it like it was yesterday!

It was a long time before I could confide my weird problem to anyone. As I say, I had never even heard of panic attacks back then, but they, or rather the fear of being sick again in public, started to really affect my life. I stopped going to assembly and hid in the Common Room, I tried to avoid meals with my boyfriend's family. I ran out of a small cinema once coz I felt so awful. After that, I generally managed to avoid cinemas and public transport. Works Christmas do's were a bit of an ordeal at first, but at no time was I ever sick again, in public, so I learned to control myself. If I couldn't avoid a situation I would try and concentrate on something else, rubbing my hands together to try and combat the tingling...and it would work.

The more times I started with an attack but got the better of it, the more confidence I got. So many years on they are still possible, but I know it's all in the mind now. I eat little before a stressful event, except for maybe a couple of ginger biscuits (ginger is a known remedy for queaziness and nausea), and I ALWAYS check out the exits / toilets if I go somewhere new...like a theatre recently.

Your panic on a crowded train sounds so like my past experiences. Your eyes desperately seek a way out and when you see no exit you panic, making things so much worse, and the more you panic the worse you feel.

It's a very viscious circle - but it CAN be broken...but not without some outside help. When I finally confessed my "weakness" to a close friend and the boyfriend who later became my husband, it was a big step in helping me to learn what to do to help me combat my irrational fears.

You will find you are in no way alone in your fears, and that different people have their different ways of distracting their minds in these situations. It does get better.