Panic Attacks: 3 Essentials to Healing

Panic attacks can be very tricky to not only recognize and treat but also to fix long term. And I thought I would share a very interesting case of a woman experiencing panic attacks and some useful Chinese medicine lessons that I think can help for the healing process if you are one of those people experiencing. Hey I'm Dr. Alex Hein, licensed acupuncturist and doctor of Chinese medicine. So before we jump into this video, two very important links right below the video there below. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can contact my private practice with the contact info below the video there. And the second is that there's a free download there for you for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So those are both right below this video. So I was speaking with this woman that was telling me about the onset of her panic attacks and she said that you know she'd been feeling a little bit anxious lately but then someone had recommended that maybe going into a flotation tank would help her calm down a little bit and zen out and feel more relaxed and help her nervous system cool down. So she bought a pass to go to one of these flotation tanks where if you've never done this you're completely sealed, it's completely dark, pitch dark, pitch black and you're laying naked floating in this high salt content bath and it is so quiet you can hear your eyes clicking when you blink. So really all you have is you with your thoughts and you with your sensations in your body. You know sensory deprivation has been used for thousands of years for mystics and bards and shamans to try to get visions which is why there's one of these associations with hermits and sages going to caves right. No lights, no sound, no stimulation, all you can do is go within. So this practice I think is very useful, I think could help a lot of modern people with anxiety and all this nervous system stuff we have. But for this poor woman unfortunately what happened was this claustrophobic experience for her produced her first panic attack and she freaked out, her heart was racing, she was sweating, she felt like she was going to faint or throw up and she had to get out of this isolation tank and just lay down on the floor for 20 minutes until she felt calm again and then she went home and was too scared to ever do it again. When she came to see me she was saying that you know this shocked her and the way she described this experience, this was when I was an intern in school, she said that this isolation tank, this sensory deprivation tank triggered her panic attack and we had a long conversation about how she could stop these panic attacks going forward because now she couldn't sleep because she was so anxious about when the next one would be. And her story brings up a very profound lesson that I think is really helpful for people with anxiety and specifically panic attacks. So the first thing is that people often attribute certain events to the triggering of their panic attacks or anxiety but in my experience the event was the trigger but the event did not cause the panic attacks. Usually what I see clinically is that there's been this physiological disruption building for months and that that event is purely the straw that broke the camel's back. And so this woman saying this panic attack was triggered from the isolation tank was actually she'd been running herself down for months or years and had some low-grade symptoms of anxiety but that was just the inflection point where now her physiology reached the impasse, it could no longer regulate itself and now she had effectively reached the point of no return. So what looked like this isolation tank produced this panic was really just that it had tipped her over the edge and now she had a hard time getting back to that equilibrium again. So panic attacks can be tricky because most often unless they happen in the middle of the night they are a reaction to a change in sensation in your body. So a person who has a panic attack then becomes hypersensitive to further panic attacks because they recognize they know that feeling, the feeling is scary, it's weird, maybe they feel sweaty, maybe they feel cold hands and feet, maybe they get a little zinger, a little shot of adrenaline, and maybe they know what's coming next. The faintness, the breathing, the headache, they know it's about to come and then that tips them over the edge again. And so a lot of the training I do with patients that have panic attacks is just helping them recognize that they have to learn to recognize those sensations and a lot in the same way that someone with migraines will learn to take migraine medication right when they notice one coming on and it will stave off the migraine, the person with panic attacks if they can recognize uh-oh the sensation's coming, it's changing, and if I can just do my system, my ritual, whatever it is at that time I can stave off the panic. So in Chinese medicine this idea of panic attacks we often call upward surging and upward surging can be a lot of things. There are a lot of people who have upward surging resulting in anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks being just one of them. Upward surging can be headaches, can be a lot of different things but I find that what's helpful for the person with panic attacks to heal is to number one recognize that a panic attack is a reaction to a sensation in your body that is foreign or sometimes familiar in not a good way and recognizing that it doesn't mean you're going to guarantee to have a panic attack. You may feel panicky all of a sudden, you may notice that it's about to come and so you know when that happens I need to get up and I need to go for a walk around the block for 20 minutes and then my physiology will have calmed itself down enough to go back to normal. And two to recognize that what maybe initially triggered the panic attack is probably just the straw that broke the camel's back and it isn't that social scenarios cause your panic attacks or that new dates cause your panic attacks or that playing with dogs cause panic attacks but it's just understanding that right now that thing is a trigger for your susceptible physiology. And the third thing that when your physiology goes back to a state where it is calmer that those triggers will no longer exist. For me primarily I use formulas for treating that physiological state. I view panic attacks and anxiety as absolutely physiological. I treat it the way a conventional doctor would but and we get the physiology to a state where the person is not experiencing what we call that upward surging as much where the nervous system is not going from zero to a hundred because you know it saw a big scary dog out front and that that's like my panic trigger. And when we get the physiology to a point where you know it's going like this every day to a point where the highs are lower and the lows are higher we give the person to this point those flares you know are not quite as severe. But I find that the singular most important thing is physical exercise. So I want to leave you with that. If you're experiencing a panic attack acutely the most important physical thing is to do something with your body. Walk, run. If you're feeling a little bit anxious today you know you might have one. Make sure you do an hour workout. Clear your whole schedule for that and that will help even out your nervous system and your physiology a little bit more. But big thing is recognizing that the trigger is not what caused your panic attack. The trigger is just when your physiology is susceptible it is in a hypersensitive state. The state of sympathetic dominance is more predisposed is more prone towards more of these triggers and as that state equalizes those triggers will not be able to trigger that quite as much. But Chinese medicine I mostly use formulas for this and they're very very effective. All right guys that's all I have for today. So don't forget two links below this video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine you can contact my private practice right below this video and there's also a free download for you right below this video and otherwise I have two other videos on this topic of anxiety and panic over here.