Has Anyone Ever Had Anxiety Come Out Of No Where.. ????

[Britanica]

so this happens to me quite often...

i will be sitting at the computer, watching tv, shopping, or simply talking to someone... then I get light headed, feel very strange, get very dizzy and cant focus. i some times feel pains in my head and get flushed, like a cold sweat. i've learned to just lay down and relax when this happens because if i dont i will start a horible anxiety attack.

is it normal to get this out of no where??? it actually just happended to me 5 minutes ago..

it some times really scares me :(

[forwells]

Hi Britanica

I read you last post and was going to reply but i shall do this one first .

Lets see if i can put your mind at rest a bit and stop you from being so scared of this .

Answer to your question . Has Anyone Ever Had Anxiety Come Out Of No Where.. ???? My guess would be everyone here at one stage or another . I know my worst panic years ago came from nowhere and left just as fast .

You may not think that there is a trigger but there is . There is always a reason behind why the body acts the way it does but often we don't see this and then we question why and it starts to worry us and then we end up in this circle of anxiety and fear .

Ok lets try to explain it in simple terms . Your body dose many things , in fact they believe 95% of things without asking you if you want it to .
Lets take walking , running , scratching your nose . Do you think about doing this ? No you just put one foot in fount of another or you just lift your hand and scratch your nose . This is how anxiety works .

You may be sitting there watching TV and see something on telly that triggers the flight response but what happens is because you have lived with it for so long the first thing you do is panic and start to dread what is happening . This is turn tells your brain that there is something wrong , that there is danger there and that it needs to prepare for the fight . There can be many triggers and most of them you don't see because they are on a sub conscious level and your body reacts and then you react on a conscious level and are in panic or increased anxiety before you know it .

See in order to get past anxiety you have to retrain this sub conscious. You have to stop it reacting to these symptoms . There are two lots of symptoms . One is the stress one and the second is the symptoms from the reactions you have towards the first .

I will tell you that what you are going though sucks and i would not wish it on anyone ( well maybe the odd doctor for a while :lol: ) but it is nothing nasty , nothing bad and nothing that is going to hurt you . It is just your nervous system running out of whack .

The bases of anxiety is stress and nothing more . Anyone with high stress will get anxiety because high stress changes the way the brain works . So by de stressing and the biggest one for this is to learn to stop reacting with fear to those symptoms , the stress will reduce and the symptoms will get less and less and you will not have to control the reaction because there will be nothing to react to .

Now one thing you may be saying now is But im not stressed , Heads up your on a anxiety forum worried about your anxiety YOUR STRESSED

You have to change the way you think about the whole thing . You have to stop saying things like . Im scared , i cant cope , what if its this , what if the doctors have missed something and so on . All these questions add the fear of the unknown to your already stressed system .

You have to change it to . Its just anxiety , it will pass , i wont let it beat me , If it gets me down then i shall rest and then when i am ready i shall get up and go again . I can handle this .etc etc .

Yes i know that it is hard and you don't sort of believe this but the more you say it the more it becomes the truth .

See the brain sees in black and white . What you tell it it believes . It will believe everything you tell it and will question nothing . The sub conscious is not build to question but it is built to react . Just look at the first set of things you may be telling you brain and you should see why it is that you are anxious and always on edge.

This is also how hypnosis makes people behave like a chicken :P . Because it gets into that primal part of the part , the one that doesn't question and convinces it that it is a chicken . They are not acting they are just convinced that it is the normal way they should be acting .

Cheers and hope that helps you fears somewhat .
I want to add something to the other thread

kev :D

[hesson81]

That was a very accurate reply. I would to deal with "random" anxiety before, but Some times you get so consumed with the anxiety you forget what created it.

There is a definate detatchment from what you think is causing it to. Most people know what'ts causing their anxiety, I don't. I have to figure it out, and often times, once you figure it out, you might even find your anxiety levels subsiding. I have expereinced that before. Expereience what I thought was "random" anxiety/panic feelings, but once I took a time out and took a look at what was going on in my life that day, and I found the reasons why my anxiety levels would be raising. Once I did that I felt some releif from my anxiety.

I don't know why that detatchment happens. I'm told over time with practice it can go to a normal level again. It took me almost a year to get where I am now...

[tconnorbok]

Perfectly said Forwells...


Britanica I have the same problem sometimes, I will be watching TV and then out of know where it hits me. Sometimes it stays for awhile but then I will try to focus on something else and it will then go away.

[jj1983]

This is me. I know HOW and WHY my stress started and sometimes I feel some better but then out of no where I feel dizzy, or "sick" just a "not well" feeling. This happens to me on a daily basis!! It is typical anxiety. Listen to Forwells,he is very smart:)

[jadelicosner89]

i was fascinated by the accurate and well stated reply there.. it helped me a lot too.. thanks so much 8)

[Robbed]

You may be sitting there watching TV and see something on telly that triggers the flight response but what happens is because you have lived with it for so long the first thing you do is panic and start to dread what is happening .

I don't think that 'free floating anxiety' (ie anxiety without an apparent trigger) in this situation really has anything to do with what you are thinking or what you are watching on television. From my experience, I can experience free-floating anxiety when watching a scene from a movie on Saturday. But that same scene might not bother me at all on Tuesday. I personally look at 'free-floating anxiety' as just the way things are with anxiety disorder. In other words, when your mind is in an anxiety state, it acts in an unpredictable manner. This causes symptoms to occur anywhere and at any time for no apparent reason.

I also find that it is definitely best NOT to try to figure out what might have triggered 'free-floating anxiety'. Doing so is bound to do nothing more than lead to frustration, despair, and additional stress and anxiety. As Claire Weekes herself would say, ACCEPT, ACCEPT, ACCEPT. Accept that free-floating anxiety is just a part of the craziness of anxiety disorder. Accept that this anxiety may be present for some time. But accept that, as your overall stress levels decrease, so will your tendency to experience 'free-floating anxiety'.

[forwells]

Howdy :D


I don't think that 'free floating anxiety' (ie anxiety without an apparent trigger) in this situation really has anything to do with what you are thinking or what you are watching on television. From my experience, I can experience free-floating anxiety when watching a scene from a movie on Saturday. But that same scene might not bother me at all on Tuesday. I personally look at 'free-floating anxiety' as just the way things are with anxiety disorder. In other words, when your mind is in an anxiety state, it acts in an unpredictable manner. This causes symptoms to occur anywhere and at any time for no apparent reason.

OK now im confused . What is free flowing anxiety and how can you have this .

In my option anxiety is a reaction , a thought and nothing more . This is why when we change that reaction we can have the same symptoms form high stress and still have very little reaction.

I guess that free flowing anxiety is just what people call stress symptoms that seem to come from nowhere .

But it dosent come from nowhere . The reaction that we have towards those symptoms are there because that is the way we have learned to react and this is a good thing because it also means that we can learn not to react .


From my experience, I can experience free-floating anxiety when watching a scene from a movie on Saturday. But that same scene might not bother me at all on Tuesday.

I understand what you are getting at here but i think what many people miss is that because anxiety is based in stress then that has to be taken into account .
For example Saturday might have been a relaxing day . You may have had very little stress that day so when you watch that movie it you would have had a reaction but you may not have felt it . But then you take Tuesday , you might have been more stressed from work or school or the kids may have played up . So when we watch the same movie this time it also causes a reaction but because our stress is already high from a stress full day we feel it more . And this is when we bring anxiety back into it because we dont see this and we think that it has just come out of nowhere we start to think and think being the key word here what is happening , its coming back , why was i so good and now its coming back etc etc . So you can see that there are many factors that play into it but when it comes down to it is only the way that we have learned to react to it . As you said if and when we see the truth and not the rubbish behind it and start to accept that we are fine and it is only high stress that is the bases behind all this and then when we start to do something about that will we recover .

anxiety disorder I really don't like that saying and would love to meet the person that coined it that . When did a perfect normal reaction to something become a disorder . If your scared which anyone with anxiety is then fear i would have said was a normal reaction and not a disorder. Again i state that when you are no longer scared because you have the facts then you will no longer react with that fear and anxiety will fade away

The one thing we must never forget is that the sub conscious works in a split milli second . before we ever know what is happening . But we do have the ability to put it back in its box and teach it new correct things .

cheers kev :D

[Robbed]

But it dosent come from nowhere . The reaction that we have towards those symptoms are there because that is the way we have learned to react and this is a good thing because it also means that we can learn not to react .

I still disagree. Trust me, I have had a sudden onset of anxiety symptoms PLENTY of times. And believe me, I have searched high and low for ANYTHING I might have been thinking at the time which could have caused this to occur. And most of the time, there was NOTHING I could see. Even if I WAS thinking something at the time, it was probably something REALLY stupid, like thinking of getting a glass of water or a piece of bread. And I SERIOUSLY don't think that my mind was somehow seeing something sinister in THAT kind of a thought.

Yes, when it all comes down, there was SOME reason why anxiety symptoms happened to ramp up at that time. But the way I see it, it was probably just a result of the unpredictability of anxiety disorder in general. NOT something that has to be figured out and worked out in order to recover. After all, I have given up trying to figure out the causes of 'free floating anxiety' long ago, and gotten MUCH better as a result. This, by the way, is a BIG reason why I am not a fan of traditional (ie TEA form based) CBT.



I understand what you are getting at here but i think what many people miss is that because anxiety is based in stress then that has to be taken into account .
For example Saturday might have been a relaxing day . You may have had very little stress that day so when you watch that movie it you would have had a reaction but you may not have felt it . But then you take Tuesday , you might have been more stressed from work or school or the kids may have played up . So when we watch the same movie this time it also causes a reaction but because our stress is already high from a stress full day we feel it more . And this is when we bring anxiety back into it because we dont see this and we think that it has just come out of nowhere we start to think and think being the key word here what is happening , its coming back , why was i so good and now its coming back etc etc . So you can see that there are many factors that play into it but when it comes down to it is only the way that we have learned to react to it .

This all sounds good in theory. But there is just one little problem: from my experience, my overall anxiety levels have not really fluctuated in direct correlation with the stress in my life. Having a stressful day does NOT seem to correlate to an increase in anxiety symptoms for me, at least not in the short term. Granted, in the long term, increased stress DOES increase my tendency to experience symptoms. But a bad day does not mean that I experience more symptoms. In fact, when I have a bad anxiety day, I generally find that I wake up feeling this way for no apparent reason.


anxiety disorder I really don't like that saying and would love to meet the person that coined it that . When did a perfect normal reaction to something become a disorder . If your scared which anyone with anxiety is then fear i would have said was a normal reaction and not a disorder. Again i state that when you are no longer scared because you have the facts then you will no longer react with that fear and anxiety will fade away

Anxiety may be a perfectly normal reaction to something. However, 'anxiety disorder' refers to a condition in which this reaction is high exaggerated and occurs during times when it is not appropriate (or, for many people with anxiety disorder, more or less constantly). In other words, anxiety may be normal. But 'anxiety disorder' refers to feeling something which may be normal, but in an abnormally excessive fashion. This is one reason why anxietycentre.com (which I know you have mentioned on several instances) talks about becoming 'anxiety disorder free' rather than 'anxiety free'. On the other hand, maybe 'stress disorder' WOULD be a more appropriate name than 'anxiety disorder'.

I suppose that I should also note that no two people are going to experience anxiety disorder in exactly the same way. And perhaps this is the reason why we (as well as SO many other people, 'experts' included) disagree when it comes to the existence of such things as 'free-floating anxiety'. This is also the reason why some people might respond better to, say, ACT than traditional CBT, while others might respond better to traditional CBT.

[forwells]

Howdy Robbed

I dont think we disagree . I think that the problem with it is as with much of anxiety is the wording in there .

This free flowing anxiety is not really that though because as you have said there is no thoughts behind it . I found and believe that it comes from the bodies hormones being out of whack because of the stress . I supported those hormones with Natural supps . I was hugely depressed and unmotivated at one stage and as soon as i started a supp it lifted within the week . This is why i believe that just doing CBT or talking dosent work and is the same as trying to fix a car running on faulty fuel . You need to change the fuel first for it to be fixed .

I guess one way to look at free flowing is to say that it is no different than a diabetic when their sugar drops . With anxiety it is just that a hormone is playing up . I know that hormones play a huge part from my research .

I still disagree. Trust me, I have had a sudden onset of anxiety symptoms PLENTY of times. See you wrote this and what i think you are having is stress related because you have no thoughts behind it . I was the same and refused to believe that it was only a thought thing . Often it ends with that but often it doesnt start that way .

I have to agree that i think that to call it a anxiety says that something in wrong with a person because they are scared . Well of course they are scared they have no idea what is going on . I have seen people take huge leaps from their anxiety when they start to understand it . It is this understanding that takes away the fear and the fear really is the only thing feeding it and stopping recovery . I still have many symptoms but because i know that they are only from stress i dont react to them at all and they pass very fast .

You know that i dont know a lot about CBT but when it was tried on me i looked at the lady and thought why are you telling me what i know? I wanted her to tell me what was happening . And you know out of all the doctors and mental health workers not one could explain it . It is so much like everything these days . Treat the symptoms and not the cause .

Anyway we shall sort of disagree but as i said i think it such a big subject that it is hard to explain it all in words on a forum.

cheers kev
:D

[JerJer]

"You may be sitting there watching TV and see something on telly that triggers the flight response but what happens is because you have lived with it for so long the first thing you do is panic and start to dread what is happening . This is turn tells your brain that there is something wrong , that there is danger there and that it needs to prepare for the fight . There can be many triggers and most of them you don't see because they are on a sub conscious level and your body reacts and then you react on a conscious level and are in panic or increased anxiety before you know it . "

Said absolutely perfect!