Anxiety Disorders, Panic, Phobias and Fear Part 6 Generalized Anxiety Disorder

This is a ten-part series about anxiety: How to identify the different forms of anxiety and what you can do to lessen its effects.

About 20 years ago, while driving through a series of tunnels on the way to Pittsburgh I had a panic attack. The symptoms of a panic attack are so intense, a lot of people bring themselves to an emergency room, thinking they’ve had a heart attack. Even though I had just read a book about Panic and Anxiety (which I was reviewing for our stress management catalog) I had no idea what had just happened to me.

I asked my wife to drive the rest of the way to Pittsburgh. Thinking this problem was just temporary, I insisted on driving back to Connecticut the next day. I had another panic attack as we approached those same tunnels. My wife drove the rest of the way back to Connecticut while I sat in the passenger seat wondering if I would ever drive through a tunnel again.

After we got back home, I called a counselor and described what had happened. She quickly concluded that I had had a panic attack and reassured me that many of her patients had had panic attacks and it was no big deal. But then she proceeded to ask a series of additional questions about my anxiety and stress levels. I was surprised that she was asking me more questions after we had established what my problem was. When I had answered all her questions she said: “It sounds like you may have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD for short” I remember feeling really shocked and bummed that she was saying I had had an anxiety DISORDER!

The book on anxiety I had read and then decided to reread was called “The Anxiety Cure,” by Robert DuPont, M.D., and his two siblings. Apparently panic and anxiety runs in the DuPont family as it commonly does in many families. One of his co-authors (his sister) wrote about how she had gotten over her panic attacks and had never had another one again. At that point having had two panic attacks right in a row, I didn’t see how that was possible. My intense fear of tunnels soon morphed into a fear of bridges which apparently is not uncommon for people who have had panic attacks.

One of the things the authors mentioned was a method for measuring anxiety on a scale from 0 to 10. Zero represents the total absence of anxiety and 10 represents what you would feel if you were having a panic attack. Now that I knew what a 10 felt like, interestingly (and this is also common for people with anxiety) I had no idea what ZERO felt like.

This co-author mentioned that a lot of people with anxiety don’t know what zero feels like because their anxiety levels never really drop below a 2 or 3 long enough to really experience this totally relaxed feeling. In other words, for people like me, we THINK a 2 or a 3 is zero because we’ve never experienced anything lower than that.

One Saturday morning soon after this, I played 3 sets of tennis eking out a victory against a guy I’d never beaten before. This required every last ounce of strength. After that, I went for a swim in Long Island Sound and the water was quite chilly. I felt great that day, but I didn’t really put two and two together – that this is what zero felt like - until later in the day when I had a long list of errands to run in order to get ready for a party my wife and I were planning that night.

As I went about my day, running those errands, it seemed like every place I went, had just run out of the ONE THING I had come to buy, and I had to jump back in the car and drive across town to find the next item on the list. Normally, this kind of frustration would have really stressed me out, but on this day, it didn’t bother me at all.

That’s when I said to myself: “Aha! So this must be what zero feels like.” A few months later, Dr. David Hunnicutt, then president of WELCOA asked me to write a book about stress, which they would later publish entitled STOP STRESS THIS MINUTE. How I got over my panic attacks by using this number system, was what I wrote about in chapter one.