Passing Out With Anxiety

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I want to look at a question/comment from a subscriber to the Panic Attack Recovery Newsletter.

Here is is:

“I always feel as if I have lost control when having one, but truly am able to get hold of myself typically.  However, my largest fear is that of passing out and not being able to control my body when I do. I have heard you cannot pass out when you are having a panic attack. Is this true?”
 
It is not typical to pass out from a panic attack.  If you are passing out, for any reason, you should definitely speak with your doctor.  However, it is extremely common for someone suffering anxiety or a panic attack to have the fear of passing out.  Fortunately the good news is that this thought can be demonstrated to be just fear.

One suggestion is to look at your thoughts and test them.  This time, unlike what I’ve been doing in the past, we’ll not look at Cognitive Distortions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy but we’ll try something different.  Let’s look at putting the fear of passing out to the test. 

First you can use your mind to imagine the actual scenario of passing out, i.e. what would happen.  You mentioned losing control of your body but if you think about it, every night that you lay down and go to sleep, the same thing happens, that is, you have no conscious control over your body as you sleep.

However you’ll notice that you wake up in the morning and all is well.  What you come to notice as you analyze the scenario of losing control is that you really have nothing to fear as nothing is inherently wrong with losing control in this manner.

You may say that you fear passing out and hitting your head as you fall to the ground.  Well the next time you are having a panic attack, you can simply sit down or lay down.  That way you don’t have the worry of hurting yourself. 

An added benefit is that by sitting or lying down you’re calming your panic.  You’ll no doubt remember that I’ve discussed some time ago that when you relax your physiology (the opposite of anxious behaviour), your symptoms begin to lessen.

Another thing you can do (with a therapist you trust), is to try passing out. In other words, do your best at trying to pass out when you are feeling anxious and working with your therapist. 

Now I can see that this sounds absolutely ridiculous, but it is actually a technique that many therapists use to show their anxious patients that they have nothing to worry about.

This technique works because the real lesson here is that no matter how hard you try, you cannot bring yourself to pass out when you are anxious.  Again this is obviously something to try with your therapist. 

While in this installment we did not look at Cognitive Distortions, you additionally can analyze the underlying thoughts using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.