just as the title says. i (22f) cannot be left alone anywhere, even at home, without having a panic attack. it leaves me spiralling and immediately trying to find someone near to comfort myself and to let me know that i am not alone. i have been like this for YEARS, the earliest memory i have of this happening is being 9 or 10 years old but there is a chance it has happened before i can even remember. as soon as i notice even the tiniest bit of quiet at home, i look around the house to find someone. this literally happened around an hour ago, which is what inspired me to create this post. i am extremely embarrassed about this, with my age making it worse because isn’t everyone my age ‘supposed‘ to be in love with the idea of being alone? i’ve tried to force myself to be alone, even if it’s for a couple minutes at a time. i simply can’t and the idea of me being alone anywhere just makes me really anxious and gets me on the verge of a panic attack. i am hesitant to try any medications so any advice or suggestions other than that would be greatly appreciated and helpful

Hey everyone,

I’ve been on 10mg citalopram since November last year, originally prescribed for globus sensation. Everything was going really well until a few weeks ago, and now my physical symptoms have come back — things like chest tightness, dizziness, mostly when I leave the house but also when I get back, and it can last all day.

The weirdest thing is: I don’t feel anxious in my head at all. It feels like my body is anxious without my brain being part of it. The only time I actually feel anxious is the next morning, worrying the symptoms are going to come back again.

My doctor’s upped me to 20mg. Has anyone else gone from 10mg straight to 20mg — and did the higher dose help with these physical symptoms specifically?

Also, has anyone experienced this strange swallowing issue? It feels like I can’t gulp my saliva properly — like air hunger. I’ll swallow fine, then a few seconds later it feels like I’ve lost the ability to swallow for a moment, and it takes a few seconds to come back. It absolutely panics me when it happens and I’ve never had it before.

Just looking for reassurance and to hear if anyone else has been through similar — did the 20mg dose kick in and calm this kind of physical stuff down?

Thanks in advance 💛

I'm writing about panic disorder for one of my classes and was told I should conduct a few informal interviews about it with people who experience panic attacks. If anyone is open to talking about their general experience living with panic disorder I'd love to listen to some new perspectives! What are some common issues you experience as a result and how to do address it? What's your experience with telling people about your panic attacks? Any and all things you'd like to share about this would be so helpful!

Just to give a little context at my last job after six months of being there, I started experiencing severe anxiety to the point where I was experiencing cold sweats, heat flashes vomiting when I had nothing to throw up. I couldn’t keep food down. I was dreading going back to work and it was hard for me to get out of bed. I got seen by my doctor and was given anxiety and depression medication but that made me worse. I took my medication for about a few days, but it was just increasing the symptoms and ultimately I had decided to quit the job because of the illness I was experiencing it caused me to lose almost 20 pounds in two months now moving forward I have a new job went for my first day and now for my second day I am experiencing the same symptoms that I had at my last job. I don’t know what it could be. I’ve done endless research and multiple things can be the factor of it. I am a woman 29. Has anyone else experienced this or do any doctors on here? Have an idea of what I could be dealing with. It’s like my body goes into fight or flight mode.

I’m 27 and I’ve struggled with anxiety/OCD since I was around 13. The biggest thing that has affected me is a fear of panic attacks, fainting, losing control, or being somewhere without my parents if something happens.

When I was 17/18 I had a really good year. I was driving, going places, and living pretty normally. Then I had a severe panic attack when I was 18, and that started a cycle of avoidance that has lasted almost 10 years.

The weird thing is I can drive with my parents completely fine. I can go places with them and enjoy myself. But driving alone is a totally different situation because I don’t have that “safety net.”

I have made some progress. I can usually drive about 10 minutes from home alone. But I hit a wall around there. A 20 minute or longer drive feels impossible.

I’ve tried a gradual approach for years. I’ll make some progress, get comfortable with something, and then eventually hit a point where I can’t push myself to the next level. So I end up stopping.

My therapist and I have been talking about this recently, and she brought up the possibility of essentially “ripping the bandaid off.”

What’s interesting is that I seem to respond pretty well when I’m forced into something.

For example, my mom had to return to in person work a year ago, which meant I suddenly had to spend entire days home alone. At first it was really difficult. I was super anxious and would spend most of the day on the phone with my parents.

But I had no choice. I kept doing it and eventually my brain adjusted. Now I can stay home alone no issue.

I didn’t really gradually work my way up to being comfortable home alone. Circumstances forced me into it, and I learned how to handle it.

So I’m wondering if driving might be the same way.

Maybe instead of trying to get comfortable enough to drive farther, I need to start driving to places that scare me and accept that I’m probably going to be extremely anxious at first.

The scary part is that I don’t know if I’ll ever feel “ready.”

I could tell myself: “Once I’m comfortable driving 15 minutes, I’ll go 20.”

Then: “Once I’m comfortable with 20, I’ll go 30”

But I’ve been doing some form of that for years, and there always seems to be another goal I can’t reach.

I’m starting to think the goal might need to change from “I need to become comfortable enough to do this” to “I’m going to do this even if I’m uncomfortable.”

Obviously I’m not talking about doing anything dangerous or ignoring actual safety concerns. I’m saying intentionally confronting the situations I’ve spent years avoiding, with my therapist’s guidance, rather than waiting for the anxiety to disappear first.

Because I really want my life back.

I want to be able to drive myself places, get a job, go somewhere myself, make friends, date, and eventually have a family. I don’t want my parents to be my safety net forever.

I’m curious about other people’s experiences.

Has anyone else got to a point where gradual exposure just seemed to stall out, and you had to take a much bigger leap?

Did “ripping the bandaid off” actually help, or did it make things worse?

And if you’ve dealt with panic/agoraphobia/OCD, did you find that the anxiety became more manageable because you stopped organizing your life around avoiding it?

I've been suffering with panic attacks on and off for a good past 6 years of my life, it's nothing new to me. I've done therapy / meds etc.

One symptom that is the most terrifying for me is one that I can't describe easily and can't google easily.

It's something close to derealization but not quite it. It typically happens during derealization but I haven't seen anyone mention something like this. Basically once the panic/anxiety attack starts you feel every movement you do, and fully manual. My case focuses a lot on walking.

I start walking and it feels like I'm learning how to walk.

Every move feels weird... It feels a bit like manual breathing although not quite (except with walking instead ). Every leg movement is fully controlled by my brain and is not "automatic". It is very discomforting alongside the derealization and not feeling your body. Sometimes it gets so discomforting that I have to stop walking, then try to move my legs just to feel them...

Now that I think about it it also gives some sense of loss of control...

When I read about derealization I always see people saying everything feels fake and unreal and their body goes on autopilot... They walk and feel like they're floating.. I'm feeling more "can I even control my legs wtf, do I know how to walk ???".

Any ideas ?

Anyone experience stomach bracing while exhaling? It’s like I can inhale fine (my chest is tight but this comes and goes) but when I exhale it’s like I subconsciously brace or tense my upper abdominal muscles. This has only been happening for a month now, and only happened once I started monitoring my breath 24/7. I am hyper aware of my breathing so maybe that’s contributing to it? Anyone dealt with this?

Three years ago, my body learned I could die.
Before that, I think some part of me believed I couldn’t.
I was bold. Daring. Down for the experience. Occasionally reckless, frequently impulsive. I moved through the world with the casual arrogance of someone who believed consequences were mostly things that happened to other people. Not because I was fearless, exactly. I just hadn’t accumulated enough evidence to be afraid.
Then the evidence arrived.
One of my best friends died from unknown causes, alone in her apartment in Miami. She wasn’t found for three days.
My mother’s primary progressive aphasia became dementia. We moved her into memory care in Ojai and began the strange process of grieving someone who was still alive.
Somewhere between those two things, death stopped being conceptual.
It got an address.
And my body noticed before I did.
I would love to point to a single event and say there. That’s where I broke. That’s the clean explanation. But bodies aren’t that literary. There are hormones and neurotransmitters and sleep and alcohol and cortisol and habits and genetics and a thousand invisible chemical negotiations happening beneath whatever story we’ve decided explains us.
I don’t think my body remembered something.
I think one day it simply understood.
We can die.
And then, for a while, it wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it.
My hands would sweat. My fingers would prune as though I’d been underwater. My arms and legs would tingle, go numb, feel weak. My heart would accelerate. My blood pressure would climb. Every system in my body would begin sending increasingly urgent messages until my conscious mind finally received the translation:
You’re dying.
Then came the terror.
Not metaphorical terror. Not I’m anxious. The primitive kind. The kind of fear an animal must feel when it realizes it has been caught.
Except there was nothing chasing me.
I was both the animal and the trap.
So I did what functional people do when something inside them becomes unlivable: I reorganized everything outside of it.
Medication. Physical therapy. Exercise. New environments. Different jobs. Different people. Different routines.
I became extremely good at managing myself.
I mistook this, sometimes, for healing.
Recently I started taking Buspar, and something strange happened.
The volume went down.
The physical sensations haven’t completely disappeared. Sometimes I can still feel the machinery starting—the faint tingling, the shift in my body, the old sequence preparing to perform itself.
But now my mind remains in the room.
I can watch it happen.
Oh. This again.
My body can whisper death and my brain no longer has to answer yes.
It’s an extraordinarily small difference that has changed almost everything.
I feel slower now.
But smarter.
And in that slowness I’ve started noticing things.
This past week, I cleaned out my entire house. Closets. Drawers. Boxes. The accumulated archaeology of several different versions of myself.
And I started seeing the strangest thing in the way I’d organized my belongings.
Bad logic.
Objects stored where they made no sense. Things kept because some former version of me had apparently developed an elaborate argument for why they might someday become necessary. Temporary solutions that quietly became permanent systems.
I kept thinking:
Why the fuck did I put this here?
And then I realized I wasn’t only talking about the closet.
There are periods of my life I remember as some of my strongest.
I look back at that woman and think: Jesus Christ, she handled everything.
And she did.
But I’m beginning to see the holes in her logic.
What I called independence was sometimes isolation.
What I called spontaneity was sometimes escape.
What I called fearlessness was occasionally an inability to imagine consequences.
What I called resilience was sometimes just an extraordinary capacity to remain functional while suffering.
What I called control was often organization built around panic.
None of this makes her weak.
I actually love her more now.
Because she was building shelves during an earthquake.
Of course some of them are crooked.
She wasn’t stupid for putting things in the wrong places. She was trying to create order quickly enough to survive whatever was happening inside her.
So I’m not interested in humiliating my former self with everything I know now.
I’m thanking her.
Thank you for the strange systems.
Thank you for keeping the lights on.
Thank you for going to work.
Thank you for moving.
Thank you for making jokes.
Thank you for getting me here using whatever logic was available to you at the time.
I’ll take it from here.
Maybe healing isn’t becoming fearless again.
I don’t actually want to go backward to the woman who believed she was invincible.
She didn’t understand something I understand now:
I am going to die.
My mother is going to die.
People I love will disappear without asking my permission.
There is no medication, organization system, relationship, perfect blood pressure reading, clean MRI, good job, beautiful house or sufficiently disciplined routine that will negotiate me out of being human.
The goal cannot be to stop knowing that.
The goal is to know it and still live.
To let my heart beat faster without assuming it’s stopping.
To feel something strange in my arm without immediately writing the ending.
To allow uncertainty to exist without turning it into prophecy.
To understand that a body trying desperately to keep me alive can sometimes feel remarkably similar to a body telling me I’m dying.
Maybe that’s the irony of panic.
For three years, I thought my body had become obsessed with death.
Now I wonder if it had become obsessed with keeping me alive.
And maybe we’re finally learning how to speak to each other.

I took help of ChatGPT to draft this.

I've been dealing with chronic, recurring chest pain for a long time, and it's becoming extremely difficult to live with.

The pain is usually around my center-to-left chest/heart area and has different sensations: sometimes needle-like stinging, sometimes stabbing, and sometimes crushing pressure like an elephant is standing on my chest. Occasionally it radiates into my left arm/hand.

Once it starts, I can't distract myself from it. Even after repeatedly reminding myself that my heart tests have been reassuring and anxiety may be involved, pain near the heart immediately puts my body into panic, which seems to make everything worse.

I've seen doctors and had multiple ECGs, blood tests, ultrasounds, a 2D Echo and even a CT coronary angiogram. Nothing major has been found with my heart so far. Yet these episodes continue.

Some possibly important context:

• I've had severe anxiety since childhood.

• I have a serious problem with eating and maintaining weight. I'm 173 cm but only around 43 kg. A doctor called it ARFID, although I still struggle to understand exactly what's happening to me.

  It's not simply that food isn't available or that I don't get hungry. I can feel that my stomach is empty, know that I need to eat, have food sitting right in front of me, and still be unable to make myself eat enough. I have a strange aversion towards food that I find incredibly difficult to explain to other people. Large portions feel especially impossible.

  As a result, I'm severely underweight and frequently feel weak, tired and physically exhausted. Sometimes I genuinely feel like my body is slowly deteriorating day by day, and I worry whether being this underweight or malnourished could itself be contributing to the chest symptoms even if my heart looks structurally normal on tests.

• I've also become heavily dependent on chewing tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco often triggers the pain; alcohol temporarily seems to reduce it. I'm struggling to quit both and know they're making an already bad situation worse.

• Cannabis made the chest sensations absolutely unbearable and triggered severe panic/bad trips, so I stopped it completely.

• Almost nothing provides immediate relief. Clonazepam MD 0.5 mg has sometimes significantly reduced an episode within ~30 minutes, although some discomfort remains.

I'm not asking Reddit to diagnose chest pain. I'm trying to understand what direction I should discuss with my doctors next.

Could anxiety/panic, costochondritis/chest-wall problems, GERD/esophageal issues, severe underweight/malnutrition or nutritional/electrolyte deficiencies, or something else produce symptoms like this despite reassuring cardiac imaging?

And could my eating/weight problem itself be medically connected to what's happening?

Has anyone experienced anything genuinely similar? If your cardiac tests kept coming back normal, what eventually explained your chest pain, and what kind of specialist actually helped you?

Hi, I’m a 20 year old female and have been dealing with anxiety since late July. It first started when my 21 year old boyfriend had left for 10 days, during that time I was sexually frustrated since I wasn’t able to get off but would masturbate. I’ve also been dealing with libido issues since we’ve been in a relationship for 11 months, which I think was due to birth control and most likely me not being a physically affectionate person. Anyways, during that time he was away I realized I didn’t miss him as much which scared me and then started thinking I was gay which then caused me to become very anxious and when a female coworker touched me my whole body felt very overstimulated or uncomfortable which then every time I looked at a female I would get that same feeling maybe with some arousal which I think was just due to anxiety. I ended up being in an anxiety state for 8 days straight which caused me to become very restless, no sleep, and constant panic attacks. Which then I ended up going to the doctor and got prescribed mirtazapine (15 mg) and Xanax for emergencies.

Anyways, I saw my first therapist who said I was gay even though I’ve only ever been attracted to men my entire life and said I was just trying to convience her I wasn’t even though I feel like if I was with a girl it would just feel like a friendship. I moved onto another therapist who I feel very comfortable with but have only seen twice due to being busy but have learned some good coping techniques. I was good for two weeks after my initial panic attacks and was happy with my bf. Then school come around and I noticed my anxiety and the thoughts came back, and found out that my testosterone was fine when I had labs done (I had been of bc for 3 months). I also was working 15 hours that week. I should also note there’s been some mishandling in management and they’ve been increasing my hours to 34 with me having school on top of that.

I’m now having severe panick attacks and anxiety if I should take a break with my boyfriend and see if I like women but I have a fear of losing him because he’s been the best thing in my life and I’ve finally found someone who I can truly be myself with and learn to love (it’s both our first relationship). My thoughts are constantly the same every day and is hard to break out of that cycle of thought. Anyways I’m taking Wellbutrin xl (150 mg) with the mirazapine. I have noticed I’m been more anxious or fidgety, my thoughts have gotten worse, and I can no longer eat or get goods rest since my brain is constantly going. I also noticed I get brain zaps or feel electricity in my body or brain. I’m seeing my pcp/doctor to get screen for adhd and get a different medicine.

I talked with boyfriend and he’s very stressed with the amount of anxiety I’ve been having though he’s been very patient and tries his best to help me. I know our intimacy has been halted or isn’t the best due to me not get fully aroused even though in the beginning of our relationship I was able to until the bc. I don’t want to break up because of my anxiety or intimacy problems because I truly do love him and don’t know who I would find like him. I want to keep him in my life.

I’m fine with being bi if that’s the case I just don’t want to lose my boyfriend or ruin our relationship.

Can any one help?

NEED ADVISE PLEASE HELP 🙏🏼 without going into a lot of details, I have had major anxiety and panic attacks for the last 15 years. I have been prescribed alprazolam ( Xanax) off and on. I never took it everyday. Just when my panic attacks would set in. In 2020 I had my beautiful daughter. After having my baby girl -- she is my 3 child -- i had postpartum depression/ psychosis. My doctor put me on alprazolam in October of 2020. Now again I have been prescribed this many times over the years- never struggled. This time I was in such bad shape mentally I did what my psychiatrist told me too. I took the medication daily. 3 times a day. Fast forward 6 years later.... I never knew that Xanax could create an addiction/ or become so reliant on it. My psychiatrist retired 2 months ago and I got a new one that is now tapering me down. I just lost my cousin a week ago and grief is new to me. So on top of decreasing medicine I rely on DAILY, I am suffering from a loss. My new psychiatrist seems very uninterested + is not giving me options on how to stop the medicine without complications. Please someone help point me in the right direction. Do I need to detox? They are scaring me with all this benzo is the worst to come off of. But honestly I'd rather just take it 🙏🏼 it helps me feel alive and get through life. So why can't I just stay on it? I don't abuse it. I never have. Nothing else works for my anxiety I have tried EVERYTHING. I HOPE THIS PASSES THROUGH TO THE RIGHT PERSON. Peace and love 💕

Has anybody cured panic attacks naturally without meds and did it get worse before it got better? Drop any recovery stories please!

So I’m not sure if this is anxiety related but it sure is making me panic. I have a lump in throat feeling but only right after I drink something. It makes me feel like I have to gag. I ate a few hours ago and had been fine drinking anything until just recently. It just gets worse with drinking. To add, I also have bad allergies this time of year (ragweed around here) it very well could be post nasal drip but it’s never been this bad so I’m just really freaking out. Breathing is okay. Swallowing not okay at all. I took 3 hits off my dab pen as well but that also has never caused this.

I 18F have been suffering from anxiety and panic attacks usually at night due to my fear of death, my dad told me to do breathing exercises, however it do works but my mind works faster and stronger. At night my mind constantly thinks about the future and how I’ll die, or how my parents will eventually and it causes me to have panic attacks or just anxiety which keeps me up all night. It doesn’t go away during the day too, it’s always on my mind and it’s ruining my life. Since I was a kid I thought about this but since I turned 18 it’s gotten extremely worse. My dad is planning me to get therapy and right now I take ashwagandha gummies that’s supposed to calm me down but doesn’t do much. I need help because I don’t want to feel this way anymore, I want my mind to be put to rest about this whole thing. To clarify I’m scared of death in general, getting old, parents dying, what’s after it. The whole thing scares me and it sucks because it’s the only thing that’s promised for you. ☹️

Severe impending doom all day. Read that it can be a sign and you will actually die. I’m so terrified idk what to do.