Scary symptoms on waking

If you actually woke directly into this state it was unlikely to have been a panic attack. The symptoms do fit somewhat, but panic attacks come on when we get over-anxious and hyperventilate for a while, and we don't do that in our sleep.

Glad to hear you're seeing your doctor soon. It's vital to describe your symptoms as accurately as you can.

For example, did you wake up to all these symptoms, or did some of them develop over the next few minutes? Did you perhaps wake up with tingling and numbness in your hands, and did the feeling of tightness in your chest develop over the next couple of minutes? Or the other way round? Or neither?

And were your hands really numb? Did you have any sensation in them at all or was it just subjective? And was the tingling just a slight sensation of prickling in your finger-tips or did it feel like electric shocks? In my own experience, the tingling feeling produced by hyperventilation is quite mild, and even though my fingers feel numb, they're not really. However, I also suffer bouts of peripheral neuropathy due to a diagnosed auto-immune condition. These often happen during the night and feel entirely different from the odd sensation produced by hyperventilation. My hands are quite literally numb during peripheral neuropathy attacks - no sensation at all from touching them etc., just the electric shock feeling.

The other possibility is that you woke in an attack of sleep paralysis. This is when the brain hormone that paralyses the body during dream sleep (to stop us jumping up and acting out our dreams) either kicks in before we're asleep or continues for a minute or two after we wake. This typically causes a feeling of pressure on the chest, total paralysis and often tingling or other odd sensations in the hands or elsewhere in the body. It's scary but completely harmless, and doesn't require treatment. Everyone gets it once or twice in their life.

Sorry if I sound pedantic, but I used to be a nurse, and I know so many people get wrongly diagnosed because they don't describe their symptoms accurately. I know it should be up to the doctor to ask the right questions, but I'm afraid they don't always - particularly in the UK, where they're so overloaded they don't have the time.