My short-ish answer: I've been on medicine for awhile now. I don't feel like it's the right prescription mix yet for handling my biggest problems, but it partially helps with my GAD at least. I'm still anxious most of the time, but generally I don't have panic attacks without triggers now. When I do have panic attacks now, I get these symptoms: I'll get very distressed, panic at any form of change in situation during the attack, running thoughts, become unreasonable, have difficulty breathing, chest and throat pain, general physical "achy" feelings, get teary, and become instantly exhausted. I'm probably forgetting things, but that covers it for the most part. Less common symptoms I have experienced before, include: visual distortions, frustration, fight or flight type feelings, sluggishness, restlessness, hypersensitivity, etc. In the long answer bellow I will explain the way I deal with the attacks. I'd like to give a simple list, but what I think is good advice is not what I manage to do. Long answer: I've dealt with anxiety for a long time, it starting becoming "general anxiety disorder" level around 15-17 I believe. At that time I would have pretty mild anxiety attacks, but they happened so often I literally thought it just was how things were. The heavier my college workload got the more pronounced my symptoms became. At this time I started picking up a coping habit of taking a step back and regrouping before I returned to whatever triggered the initial anxiety. This method isn't a bad one, but as my problems continued to get worse that coping habit became its own issue that caused even more stress. Between 17-18 I started showing pretty intense signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (Primary O). OCD if you're not familiar with it, tells you specific things to worry about. Pairing GAD and OCD together creates a person who's constantly anxious with light attacks, and then also will have spikes that cause vivid panic attacks. The best thing I could have done at this point was go to a doctor and therapist for help, but as someone who already disliked doctors and had an intense fear issues. I didn't. (Getting help early on makes a huge difference, the fixing my issues would've been 10x easier at that time. So don't be like me, guys.) Instead of getting help, I started dealing with these problems in what I would call the worst way possible: Avoidance. And frankly, I don't blame "past me", it was scary and I didn't really understand what was going on. Which ironically learning exactly what's happening to cause the anxiety and it's attacks is a GREAT coping mechanism. It's not going to make you magically feel better, but realizing what's going on gives you back some power. (More on this shortly.) But the damage using avoidance caused has now turned into my biggest problem. You see. Avoidance helps. It "removes" the problem, it lets you feel normal again quickly as possible. But it does two very bad things: 1. Those things you avoid often HAVE to be delt with at some point. 2. Every time you avoid something and get relief from avoiding it, you teach your subconscious that the thing was important to avoid for your survival. So next time you'll be even more scared of whatever the thing was. This is where I got stuck in a loop. And after around a year, the loop was getting pretty vicious. I was almost 19 and was at my breaking point. Upon finishing a hellish semester I didn't return to college for my last two classes for my degree. (Which was devastating.) (This is also where I finally broke down and went to my family doctor, and was promptly placed on medicine. Medicine and the pros and cons of it is something I've learned a lot about the hard way. I don't mind writing about it if anyone is interested, but I feel that it would be going off on a pretty big tangent.) To simplify what has happened after starting medicine: I basically have gone through trying several medications and four different therapists. What's important to you guys is the fourth therapist. Instead of feeding me "You can only do what you can do." and ask questions that would be relevant if my anxiety problems had a source like a traumatic experience. (Which is a respectable problem, but not my own.) This therapist does something completely different. She specializes in cognitive/exposure therapy. Like I explained about avoidance above, your brain learns to stay anxious. And these types of therapies basically go after the problem source and teach you proper coping mechanisms. (I could write about this awhile too, but everyone is so different I'm not sure if getting detailed would be helpful to anyone.) And that's kinda my entire personal situation, story, failures, and successes. My advice: Figure out your personal situation. This is helpful if you are still in a personal stage or are looking to find professional treatment. Make a list: Take note of your average condition vs. really bad days. Figure out if you think you have more than one type of Anxiety. Consider if your are facing other factors like depression. Try to figure out when the anxiety started, and what was happening in your life at the time (certain events or ages can give you clues on how to help yourself). Look into your relatives mental health backgrounds, for some people this is a factor. Figure out if you have any particular triggers. Learn as much as you can. Knowledge is powerful against fear. (Books/recordings are likely a more reasonable sources than the general internet.) Make a notebook of things that help you feel strong and secure. (With like quotes, statistics, imagery, etc). Identify healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms and use/avoid accordingly. This one is hard to do by yourself, but not impossible. This is another part a therapist is nice, but friends or family can be helpful in identifying these things with you if need be. (For example: Taking a step back and regrouping is a okay choice. Total avoidance of multiple things can become toxic.) Remember medicine is a great tool. Relearning to not feel anxious by yourself isn't always easy. Having something take the pressure off so you can do the work is okay. (But it's not likely to just fix everything for you like commercials suggest.)
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