News flash: Stress causes panic.

If you have panic disorder, you may have noticed that your symptoms get worse when you're stressed. Apparently, when you're under stress, symptoms are more likely to get increase gradually over time rather than immediately and all at once.

In other words, if you break up with your boyfriend or lose your job, and you have panic disorder, you might make it through a stressful event without panicking, but panic can still result as much as three months or more later. At least, that's according to a recent Brown U. study. From the link:

Just like everyone else, people with panic disorder have real stress in their lives. They get laid off and they fight with their spouses. How such stresses affect their panic symptoms hasn’t been well understood, but a new study by researchers at Brown University presents the counterintuitive finding that certain kinds of stressful life events cause panic symptoms to increase gradually over succeeding months, rather than to spike immediately. 

“We definitely expected the symptoms to get worse over time, but we also thought the symptoms would get worse right away,” said Ethan Moitra, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

But even if the events don’t seem to trigger an immediate panic attack, said Dr. Martin Keller, professor of psychiatry and human behavior and principal investigator of the research, patients, family members, or their psychiatrists need to keep their guard up.

Interestingly:

A statistical analysis of the results found that for stressful life events in the categories of “work,” such as a demotion or layoff, or “friends/family/household,” such as a family argument, panic symptoms that had meandering severity before the event, increased steadily but gradually for at least 12 weeks afterward.

Stressful events in seven other categories, such as “crime/legal” or “deaths” did not seem to affect panic symptoms at all.

 (Via.)

You are large, you contain multitudes.

During a panic attack, you may think you're having a heart attack and in danger of dying. Of course, you're not; there's nothing wrong with your heart.

You may think you're going crazy. Of course, you're not; you come out the other side of each and every panic attack you experience feeling fine -- a little more neurotic, maybe, but still perfectly sane.

If you're like me -- if you've had more than a few panic attacks -- the following words, from a Wired interview with author and neuroscientist David Eagleman,  probably make a whole lot of sense to you:

Most people probably feel like they know their own brain reasonably well. After all, our thoughts form the core of who we are, or at least who we understand ourselves to be. But it turns out we know only a tiny portion of what our brains are doing and where our own thoughts come from.

I find this passage resonant, as well:

I make this argument about the brain being like a team of rivals. I synthesize a lot of data to show that you are not one thing, but instead your brain is made up of these competing networks that are all battling it out to control this single output channel of your behavior. And so your brain’s like a neural parliament, and you’ve got these different parties in there like the Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, all of whom love their country and feel that they know the best way to steer the ship of state. But they have differing opinions on how to do it, and they have to fight it out.

This is why we can cuss at ourselves and cajole ourselves and get angry at ourselves, and this is why you can do behavior and look back and think, “Wow, how did I do that?” It’s because you are not one person, you are not one thing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes."

The interview spans topics from how neuroscience could improve the legal system to the importance of gut feeling in decisionmaking to whether Mel Gibson is antisemitic.

Can a website help you better manage your anxiety and panic?

Maybe sometimes you get so scared you think you're going to die. Or maybe your head jitters with anxiety, or wondering whether life is worth living makes it hard to get out of bed.

What do you do? Steps taken by people with panic, anxiety, and/or depression include psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, SSRIs, benzodiazepenes, exercise, meditation, and biofeedback -- and that's just the start of the list.

But do any of them actually work?

Typically, at PANIC!, we've addressed questions of treatment efficacy via discussion of information from "official" sources -- published research studies, for instance.

Sites like CureTogether and patientslikeme offer a new and exciting source of information about what ails you, from the type and severity of the symptoms that others report, to the popularity and perceived efficacy and side effects of a wide range of treatments.

By submitting information about yourself (anonymously), you can help strengthen the database of knowledge about health problems -- and maybe learn about a treatment that could work for you.

If nothing else, these sites remind us that we're not alone. (On one of the sites, I actually found an example of someone who's also panicked while meditating!)

Can acupuncture and acupressure relieve panic and anxiety?

Acupuncture and acupressure have been around for a very long time. (Both were developed in ancient China, c. 2,000 B.C. A long time, indeed.) Both practices involve stimulating trigger points in precise locations on the body in order to corrent the flow of chi (a.k.a. vital energy) through the body and thereby remedy health complaints. Where acupuncture involves inserting needles at those points, acupressure involves applying touch to them.

Can acupuncture and acupressure help relieve panic and anxiety? I couldn't tell you. My experience with them, aimed at addressing foot pain, had uncertain results. But they're covered by many health insurance plans these days, and it's unlikely that insurers would agree to spend money on illegitimate treatments. So, yeah, I'd say it's likely they can help.

But don't listen to me. Studies point to the efficacy of acupuncture in relieving anxiety among parents whose children are undergoing surgery and dental patients, among others. From the first link in the previous sentence:

A parent's anxiety leaps when their child is going into surgery. But a new study shows acupuncture needles -- carefully placed around the mother's ear -- can decrease her anxiety. When moms are less anxious, there's less anxiety in children, experts say.

Auricular or ear acupuncture has long been known to relieve stress and anxiety. Until now, however, it was not known that needles placed around the ear were so effective in relieving parental anxiety associated with a childs' surgery, a constant and very real concern for doctors. 

Researcher Shu-Ming Wang, MD, at the Yale University School of Medicine. Wang presented study findings at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists being held in San Francisco this week.

Among the benefits of acupressure, of course, is that, unlike acupuncture, you can do it yourself.

Interested in giving it a try?

Here is a YouTube video showing acupressure points on the hands for anxiety, panic, and palpitations.

Here a practitioner discusses several acupressure points for anxiety, including the "Hall of Impression," the "Courtyard of the Spirit," and the "Lesser Palace."

May your chi flow freely and your anxiety and panic be nevermore!