Well, it could be psychological in origin, but I opted to drop by this forum searching for someone suffering from what I had and do still have to some degree. Mine were physiologic in origin. Most people don't even consider it. I'll tell you part of my story:
Docs poisoned me a couple years ago. Loads of gastic woes. Belching. Vertigo. Months on end with no help. Failing liver. Burning guts. HARSH ANXIETY ATTACKS. All just started one day after eating a Golden Oyster mushroom and a nice steak. I had been consuming lots of mushrooms -- Portabello, Shiitaki, just loving them. All that while my docs gave me acid blocking meds for my heartburn/ GERD. Thus, I had a fungal infection arise in the guts called Candida because the healthy bacteria/yeast/fungi in the guts were out of balance. Digested fungi broke down. Their nutrients fueled further fungal growth. My small intestine was perforated under a thing called Leaky Gut Syndrome. My foods consumed were fermenting, not breaking down. The yeast/fungi (dimorphic) was coating my small intestine -- hindering absorption and lowering blood sugar while the yeast competed for sugars in the GI tract. The fight wore down my adrenal glands which are strong regulators of blood sugar stability.
Anyhow, when blood pressure and blood glucose drop too low (very common at night when cortisol levels are low)....panic attacks are very common. Because my adrenals are weak and still healing, if I wear them down too much or stay up too late for too long, I start to get dizzy. If that continues too long, I eventually suffer not really panic attacks like I had under the allergic shock to foods (as microscopic food particles entered my bloodstream under Leaky Gut)....but a weird kind of anxiety, panic, and adrenalin rush. What happens is that my blood glucose drops too low while sleeping. BP drops, too. The heart gets beating too weak and even stops. I awaken sort of bewildered. My vision is red and hypoxic. Whether psychological or physiological in origin, next a panic attack comes that isn't really from my own fear. I'm too sleepy to be afraid. It's more adrenalin secretion; A big jolt of adrenalin to kickstart the heart; The body's automatic jumpstart. Then, I sit there trembling and praying among massive adrenalin rush -- like the kind of injections they give in an ER room -- for about 20 to 30 minutes. It passes.
What makes it go away in my case? Eating a light snack or meal before bed, but not too heavy. Just some nuts. A little protein. No sugar. Heavy digestive loads lead to insulin production and that drops glucose. If you eat a steak, you'll crank up insulin, drop glucose, and the steak won't digest fast enough to raise the glucose. All you keep doing is dropping in glucose for an hour or more. So, you go with light proteins -- nuts, powders, tofu, soy milk, and some carbs along with a little veggie fiber. Soup.
Try eating lightly about an hour before bedtime. Try eating your meals as about 5 to 8 smaller ones over the day, not 3 big ones. Pre-Diabetes is difficult to detect. The docs don't care about you until your glucose is too high, but the modern diet and junk food tends to leave us always hypoglycemic. So, we eat more sugars and junk foods which give a spiking up and down rather than stable sine wave of blood glucose. It's the hypoglycemic spikes which wear down the pancreas and then you go hyperglycemic.
If you find that eating lightly helps, start paying more attention to countering Hypoglycemia and warding off Diabetes.
Also, try this: when in a panic attack, drink about three glasses of water and much on a lot of celery sticks. Celery is a natural narcotic. So, that may help some. But, this test is to see if your panic attack subsides under water and fiber flush. Takes about 20 minutes. If it seems to work like a charm each time, start studying more about Candida. There are about 79 neurotoxins cranked out by the yeast when it overgrows in the guts. Alcohol, Formaldehyde. The poisoning effect gives you anxiety attacks. Anxiety is a very common thing in shock -- glycemic / insulin shock; Trauma shock; Poisoning shock.
Food allergies -- Are you eating anything allergenic before bed or at dinner? Do this: Take your resting pulse and keep a log through the day. Before, during, and after meals. Whenever you eat something allergenic, the pulse rises from something like 60 beats per minute to over 90 b.p.m. Going to an elimination diet of 3 key foods which don't bother you for a couple days: veggies, complex carbs, and meat (Something like spinach, nuts, a little brown rice, and chicken). If you maintain resting pulse on that, then start adding in one food per meal and testing for rise. The allergenic foods you cut back to once per week.
Food allergies cause many symptoms, but anxiety attacks aren't so common unless you are concurrently dealing with a Leaky Gut issue from Candida. If the small intestine is leaky and the allergens are going into the bloodstream, I can tell you from personal experience that the slightest bit of consumption of even a teaspoon of barley or oatmeal (gluten as one of my allergens).....used to give me harsh anxiety attacks followed by great fatigue. That's mild shock.
Helpful treatments:
1) Read my other post on the Oriental Medicine trick of soaking the hands and feet only in a hot water baths. Before bed, don't shower. Shower at some other time. But, go to your bathtub. Sit on the ledge. Soak your feet in water as hot as you can take it up to the ankles. Put your hands under the faucet, too. Just sit there until you're sweating at the brow for 20 to 30 minutes. It's very relaxing and will alleviate your panic attacks while in them, but what it does is strengthen the body overall internally. Whatever woe you do have -- bodily or mental -- the trick will likely help you.
2) Nevermind any idiotic criticism you may ever hear of it from dummies. Go down to a local health food store and purchase a vial of homeopathic remedy. I'd suggest trying
Aconite, Nux Vomica, or Pulsatilla in 6X potency. Do not take 12c or 30c doses and don't take 6x for more than about a week. This is just to tickle your interest in homeopathy and feel it helping with the anxiety. These are sloppy remedy matches for you. I'd go with Nux Vomica 6x as the safest bet. At first, you may find that taking it makes everything worse or slightly worse but it then fades and you grow stronger overall. If you're just having a horrible experience with it, ride it out and stop any dosing. You can always drink some coffee as an antidote.
...A classical homeopath (one who studies you for about 2 hours and then picks a single medicine for you to try) can very probably cure this entire problem in you like nothing much. Some homeopaths prescribe in higher potencies (30c and 200c). Really sharp ones can give you a 2 hour visit, pick their poison to apply as a single drop, and cure your woe for months at a time off that single application of highly dilute poison. Others prefer a more gentle approach at the 12c level where you take one tablet per day for a month and keep adjusting course. The 6x potency I'm suggesting only lasts for a few hours; Just enough to get you to bed. It doesn't make any deep, constitutional changes. In fact, if you take it too long, you are accumulating the poison. At the 6x level, it is not dilute enough and very small traces of the original poison are still there. The poison is helpful as medicine. All medicine is a poison depending upon application. But, it has a cumulative effect if you take 6x for too long. Once you cross into 12c potencies and above, you're beyond the controversial "ultramolecular dose" limit (where you're not likely to find one molecule of the original substance). It gets into a long physics and math explanation, but essentially when diluting down to those levels and beyond you're shifting the molecule of original poison from matter to light. Imagine it like magnetizing the water more and more once diluting beyond 12c while at the 6x level you're closer to standard solutions. The sugar pellets are just laced with that water.
The hot water bath trick is essentially the same thing as a broad-spectrum homeopathic remedy in around the 6x potency. These methods stir up the life within you to push disease out and symptoms that bother you back into balance. It is like visiting a chiropractor who twists and tweeks your spine until you feel better, but here it is a twisting and tweeking of the spine of life. The regular doctor's approach is more like a sledge hammer hit in trying to cure your anxiety. The way of the homeopath is a feather's tickle here and there or a harsh poke at key points until you're back in the right posture and feeling good.
