Generalized Anxiety And Panic Attacks

[TurtleNeck]

I have panic attacks, generalized anxiety and am looking for things to help. What do you guys recommend?

Things ive looked at are carrot salads. Caffeine (I quit caffeine because of anxiousness how to introduce it back or leave it?)

Thanks I am agoraphobic right now but am collecting myself again slowly but surely!

 

[Sheik]

How many calories per day are you getting?

 

[tara]

Possibilities that might help, some of which might be relevant to you, depending on what you are missing/what might have set you up for this - if you gave us more context/history all in one place, you might get more targetted ideas:

• If you are in actual imminent danger, see if you can address it to get safe. Probably not the case, but it's hard to relax fully when under actual threat. If you are actually safe for now, then notice that.
  
• Eating enough carbohydrates regularly enough to sustain stable blood sugar without having to rely too much on stress hormones to sustain it. Not sure how old you are, but somewhere of the order of 3000 calories is normal for mature men, more if under 25 (still growing) or extra physically active (maybe not you).
• If there is a pattern of low blood sugar stress, some of us need to eat more often for a while so we don't get too stressed between meals.
  
• Check how you are going meeting specific nutrient needs. Use cronometer or similar to enter a typical day's food and see roughly what you may be getting from it. (Don't believe its calorie recommendations, often too low.) Peat usually recommends at least 80-100 g protein, plenty of calcium, magnesium.... See how the vitamins and other minerals look - any that are below recommended levels? (Peat does not recomend PUFA at all, so we mostly recommend getting ) Magnesium is particularly needed to allow nerves to relax well.
  
• Minimise PUFA consumption - favour coconut oil, cocoa butter, butter, ruminant meat over liquid seed oils and things fried or baked with them.
  
• Salt your food to taste, drink to thirst (some people drink a lot more water than they need because they've heard it's good - can cause trouble in excess).
  
• Buteyko method may have some use for you. Starting with keeping mouth shut and breathing primarily with diaphragm (not chest). I had to use mechanical support to retrain these two, but easy and worth it. Then practice with other reduced breathing techniques as on normalbreathing.com Learn section. CO2 helps calm nerves.
  
• Get sunshine on your skin when you can. Get outside for part of the day anyway. I think you are already onto the supplemental red light idea for winter.
  
• Check your body temps and resting heartrate a few times (eg an hour or two after breakfast) this can give clues about how overall emetabolism - energy production - is going in your system. Do you have any medical test results that could give clues to what's going on? (Don't share more here than you want too.)
  
• Find at least some things to do everyday that are fun for you.
• Find some kind of gentle movement that you enjoy doing - the body is made to move.
  
• Connect with other people as you can.

If coffee makes you anxious, you could try smaller amounts only with meals and see if that is different. But if it still makes you anxious like that, I'd suggest backing off it for now, and maybe trying again later.
Carrot salad is probably a good idea (unless it particularly bothers you). Helps sweep out junk in the gut. Away from other food probably does it best, but having it at all is more important than timing.

 

[TurtleNeck]

How many calories per day are you getting?

Don't count so I wouldent know

 

[TurtleNeck]

Possibilities that might help, some of which might be relevant to you, depending on what you are missing/what might have set you up for this - if you gave us more context/history all in one place, you might get more targetted ideas:

• If you are in actual imminent danger, see if you can address it to get safe. Probably not the case, but it's hard to relax fully when under actual threat. If you are actually safe for now, then notice that.
  
• Eating enough carbohydrates regularly enough to sustain stable blood sugar without having to rely too much on stress hormones to sustain it. Not sure how old you are, but somewhere of the order of 3000 calories is normal for mature men, more if under 25 (still growing) or extra physically active (maybe not you).
• If there is a pattern of low blood sugar stress, some of us need to eat more often for a while so we don't get too stressed between meals.
  
• Check how you are going meeting specific nutrient needs. Use cronometer or similar to enter a typical day's food and see roughly what you may be getting from it. (Don't believe its calorie recommendations, often too low.) Peat usually recommends at least 80-100 g protein, plenty of calcium, magnesium.... See how the vitamins and other minerals look - any that are below recommended levels? (Peat does not recomend PUFA at all, so we mostly recommend getting ) Magnesium is particularly needed to allow nerves to relax well.
  
• Minimise PUFA consumption - favour coconut oil, cocoa butter, butter, ruminant meat over liquid seed oils and things fried or baked with them.
  
• Salt your food to taste, drink to thirst (some people drink a lot more water than they need because they've heard it's good - can cause trouble in excess).
  
• Buteyko method may have some use for you. Starting with keeping mouth shut and breathing primarily with diaphragm (not chest). I had to use mechanical support to retrain these two, but easy and worth it. Then practice with other reduced breathing techniques as on normalbreathing.com Learn section. CO2 helps calm nerves.
  
• Get sunshine on your skin when you can. Get outside for part of the day anyway. I think you are already onto the supplemental red light idea for winter.
  
• Check your body temps and resting heartrate a few times (eg an hour or two after breakfast) this can give clues about how overall emetabolism - energy production - is going in your system. Do you have any medical test results that could give clues to what's going on? (Don't share more here than you want too.)
  
• Find at least some things to do everyday that are fun for you.
• Find some kind of gentle movement that you enjoy doing - the body is made to move.
  
• Connect with other people as you can.

If coffee makes you anxious, you could try smaller amounts only with meals and see if that is different. But if it still makes you anxious like that, I'd suggest backing off it for now, and maybe trying again later.
Carrot salad is probably a good idea (unless it particularly bothers you). Helps sweep out junk in the gut. Away from other food probably does it best, but having it at all is more important than timing.

Great post thank you! i am planning to get a refractometer to help with the water thing. I tend to have issues with that. I am getting better though!

Gotta start exercising again! I promised I would I overexercised last year which I think contributed to the breakdown (5 times a week heavy weights sometimes) but i am not sure. I will start maybe bodyweight training with dynamic movements. I spend alot of time on the computer either gaming or playing guitar. Things are looking up though. I read alot as well

 

[Rafe]

It's been helpful to me to think of treating anxiety as triage vs curing.
The treatments I use for each aren't very different, but thinking of it this way makes the setbacks more meaningful to me, i.e. it's just a symptom of a change of season, bad weather, an irritated intestine from something I ate, a stressful day or encounter, etc. I came to identify generalized anxiety b/c I get it as I wake up. My anxiety episodes are now more like frustration or feeling low & I get them when fatigued & later in the day.

Triage for me: bag breathing, sugar (cola, juice or milk with added sugar & salt), a good meal (especially if I've let my calories get low).

Long-term: enough peaty calories especially before around 2:00pm every day, mineral repletion (salt, salt, salt), and I later used cyproheptadine, and doxycycline after I got a better idea that my habits & outcomes were stabilizing & I could better identify stressors in my environment & what to expect them to do to me. I'm learning so much this fall. Now an anxiety episode is almost out of the ordinary for me. Thank you, Ray Peat & the forum. Could not have done it without what I learned here.
Good luck. It gets much better.

 

[tara]

Don't count so I wouldent know

Most people have got better things to do than count calories for every meal every day. But while you're trying to figure out this problem, it's probably worth trying to do it for a couple of typical days, just in case this is a key part of the problem you are trying to solve. While you are at it, if you use something like cronometer, you can also see if there are some other glaring nutrient deficiencies that could be contributing to the anxiety.

Long-term: enough peaty calories especially before around 2:00pm every day

+1

 

[Rafe]

Cronometer is easy once you get started. I think it even has a label-reader now that you use with your phone's camera, connected to a database of popular packaged foods. (I need to use it b/c I've changed things up & my nutrition could use a check-up.)
It's the best for getting an impression of what's really going on with what you are actually eating. I discovered that I was chronically under-eating when I started to use it. It's also a good motivator to get the macros & micros where you want them. Don't stress over not coming in where you think you want to at first. It's a great information source.
Ignore the targets it sets for you wrt BMI & target calories & exercise. They're ridiculous. It will seriously advise me to eat about 1400 cal/day, for example. Now that will give me stress symptoms in no time.

 

[Rafe]

@tara
Beautiful list.

 

[tara]

Ignore the targets it sets for you wrt BMI & target calories & exercise. They're ridiculous.

+1

 

[InChristAlone]

Do a search on anxiety attacks, lots and lots of suggestions on here, I wrote about it quite a bit.