I want Paul McKenna to cure my fear of flying

I like Paul McKenna. He has good taste (I saw him eyeing up my then girlfriend at the Notting Hill Carnival a few years ago.)

Paul McKenna I can change your life  Sky 3 late (2am). Tonight he attempted to cure a woman of her agoraphobia (apparently she’s been alone for only 10 mins total in the last five years). Paul went up to Hull of all places. He must be dedicated. Or they paid him a lot of money. What worked, the NLP or the hypnosis? He does speak very fast and uses a lot of gestures and taps.

NB She had CBT which didn’t work…

Later after he left, the panic came back. How much the original cure was it down to the force of his personality. Interestingly she says ‘Im panicking so I can’t remember all the thing she told me to think about’. She comes down to London for a second session (obviously Paul’s dedication didn’t stretch to another visit to Hull . She ends up cured but still living in Hull so swings and roundabouts really.

Also, he treats a gambler. He explains the Serotonin high due to gambling. He treats this by changing the association for gambling to a negative one. It seems quite simplistic. Reminds one of a weakened version of the treatment in A Clockwork Orange. Rewiring the brain.

Seeing the agoraphobic helps me because I can see that it’s just a condition that needs treating. It’s not something unique to me.

The best for me is the flying phobic who says ‘I just see that as an accident waiting to happen’. That’s just how I feel. I managed a short flight at Christmas but together is the fear of having an attack the other end, being so far from home He is resistant to Paul’ s initial NLP stuff but the hypnosis does it . After an hour he is good to go and flies. Paul McKenna is my new hero. The kind of change he manages in people in such a short space of time is pretty miraculous. I will blog more about his methods later (on this entry) when I have time.

The 6 month mark

Staggered to the end of a pretty dire week. Stress and anxiety levels pretty high.

I just want to ’stop the world I want to get off’ ! Have realised I should nevr have taken on the Manager job for a business I knew little about. My former girlfriend – who begged for a job – has been pretty hopeless which just adds to the pressure on me.

I always seen to end up in these awkward disaster-prone situations. People try and take advantage of the fact that I am enthusiastic and never-say-die. In fact this wek I felt very ‘die’ and just wanted to walk away as i have been advised by several friends and family.

I used to start the day feeling dreadful and then gradually improve throughout the day til I was positively enthusaiastuc by the end of the day. Now I am just miserable and anxiety-ridden throughout. It’s because there are potentially serious consequences to what I am doing.

I sunbathed today to try and relax. Didn’t work since I am unhappy with what my illness has done to my body.

doc Martin and panic attacks

Caught  the annoyingly watchable Doc Martin long enough to see the storyline…Doc Martin has  a blood phobia and suffers panic attacks at the sight of it… (haemophobia)

Don’t know how realistic is how (would a Dr even start medical training if they had such a phobia? How likely would it be to develop? The fictional Doc was a surgeon)

I did ask an Air stewarsd recently if he’d known any flight staff develop a fear of flying. He knew of one case where a fellow steward NEVER flew on their offtime ie didn’t take advantage of very cheap flights available. When questioned , he was a bit touchy on the subject. And transferred to ground staff.

Still watching…now one of the mother’s is getting an anxiety attack after hearing her son has had an accident. Hyperventilating, calling for water etc…

I don’t remember PAs being portrayed on screen or maybe they just didn’tregister before…

Sunday Panic Attack hangover

I slept for a couple of hours after the PA lastnight but woke at 3am and stayed up.

I was on soneone’s couch so couldnt really sleep. In the am I had the use of a bed but the room was too noisy and bright from the road (why do people have flimsy  blinds which let all the light in?).

Anyway I slept til 3 or 4pm nicely rested. Completely against the principles of sleep hygiene…

Went for a nice walk by a canal.

Still have that ‘black cloud hanging at the edges’. The feeling that the blackness is hovering, just waiting to pounce and that anything might bring it on.

I’m still under stress from business worries and responsibility.

New dread

Terrible time tonight whilst watching film (Reign of Fire). Great movie. I watched it round at friend’s house. Suddenlyhalf hour from the end strated feeling strange. I had planned to go home on the bus. I’m sure subject matter didnt help (fear, dragons, death) Would I get this if it had been a comedy. Lately I am stressed though and feel ‘tired’ often like my whole body is tired and achey even though I’ve done nothing physical.

Buzzing feeling in head. I immediately thought of what I had eaten (as I always do) Some beers a good while aho, some chocolate pudding, cup of decaf tea (was it really de-caf?). Disorienation followed.

Nothing was working, I concluded it must be a Panic Attack but as usual it felt different, like it wasn;t ‘panic’ per se . Reminded me of when it first happened (2?) years ago.

Everything seemed ‘echo-y’ things friend said seemed to echo in my consciousness a few seconds later like I delayed processing.

Yawning constantly. I didnt watch the end of film. tried to sleep. Very tired very quickly because of exhaustion (heart racing etc) PAs usually make me v.tired so it gave me some reassurance that it was a PA rather than my usual assumption of food/drink being spiked.

EXTREMELY unpleasant. Luckily I di go to sleep and woke a couple hours later normalised.

It’s now 3am ish.

Someone told me (and I also read somewhere) that TV watching affect sleep even if it doesnt actually eat into your sleep time. Alos I know TV watching late at nigt is bad but this is when they put all the good films on and I havent got a DVD recorder. Musr get one and refuse TV – also PC – after 9pm?

Thought of Linden and Barry method but egging on the PA didnt seem to work, nor did trying to do maths , using higher brain function to override Amygdala (sp) baser brain function. Couldn’t think straight enough to think of anything to do .

Also wsn’t inclined to jump up and down eating apples, I think the weirdness of that would have freaked me out even more than I was!

What helped was just going to sleep aided by the tiredness, getting unconsciousness asap

This rturn of the shit is a setback. Is more to follow.

I’m getting better…

It seems I’m improving, hence the lack of recent posts. I still have the occasional bad moment – in fact I had one today – but I can stave off the panic attacks and assure myself that i will be OK.

Distraction seems to be the larger part of this. I felt really rough earlier and thought I was heading for a migraine as I had some visual problems (probably as a result of staring at a small laptop screen for so long). thought I was going cross-eyed, brain tumour etc

My sleep hygiene is still lousy but at least it’s stable; i’m getting to sleep at 6am and rising at 1.30pm.

Sunday night and all is well?

I haven’t been blogging regularly but have been keeping my paper journal fairly up-to-date. In practice this means I write when I’m feeling stressed/anxious. Saturday night we (gf and her sister) went for an Indian to a local restaurant I 
haven’t been to before. In fact I haven’t been to any restaurants for quite a while.

Wasa bit anxious before I went, but again this boils down to ‘what if?’ thought, ie the fear of fear. The fear of having a panic attack. Or maybe the fear of just feeling bad. Constantly self-monitoring. Was OK but still I didn’t drink so the enjoyment was a bit stilted given that my companions didn’t particularly enjoy their meals. Gf had a beer into the meal. I realise drinking is part of the relaxing process of going out. Certainly if someone had said a year or so ago that  wouldn’t be allowed to drink when I went out this would be seen as a great hardship. Now, I voluntarily don’t drink as I’m afraid of the possibility of panic attack or just weird , panicky thoughts.

I wonder if this is a common experience around drinking? My first counsellor told me 
she had a client who had ’cured’ his panic attacks by having a couple of bottles of wine a day to ’relax’ him! Most people who have panic attacks report/anxiety that drinking makes them worse at first until they get plastered.  I don’t fancy the in-between stages.

Sunday night. Dark, cold and windy.

My other blog is a …

My other blog was here http://my.opera.com/addman but that one didn’t seem to get any visitors either. I like Opera Community and keep other blogs there but I think the whole thing where you have to sign up for an Opera account just to leave a comment is too hassly. Plus it’s not that easy and I find surfers are put off anything that is not immediate. I experimented between keeping a paper journal and a blog. I will probably try to do both, transerring paper thoughts onto here. Ideally I would dictate into software that wrote for me but the last tim eI tried it, the software wasn’t up to it. Perhaps things have improved?

Anyway, today I was just thinking how much I’d improved; no anxiety while just pottering around the flat. I could watch TV without any ’stomach rising’ feelings. I spoke – or thought – too soon. After an argument with the girlfriend O was rewarded with the whole stress reaction. Going into the ‘zone’ where reality seems altered which I recognise as a precursor to a panic/anxiety attack. Normally this feeling would persisit for many hours and not relieve until either I went to sleep or took some medication. However, when I’m in ‘the zone’ I don’t want to take medication as by then I’m paranoid. Valium or Larazepam don’t seem to work particularly fast for me and because I’m often getting worse, I associate those feelings of getting worse with the drug.

Watched Copycat last night which had Sigourney Weaver as a Psychologist suffering from agoraphobia/panic attacks. It was interesting to see the visual disturbances which can accompany panic attacks being portrayed on the screen. There is a review here http://tinyurl.com/3bgdag . (I also didn’t rate Sigourney Weaver until I saw het in a Sci-Fi comedy -I fill in name later!). I think they tried it in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. When I last watched that I didn’t know anything about panic attacks so didn’t pay any attention. In fact I was totally unsympathetic about anxiety/panic attacks/funny turns and the like and just thought people should ‘get a grip’.

Welcome to my blog and why I chose that name

I had a previous blog at my.opera.com/addman but the server has been down for a while soI thoughI didn’t seem to get anyone readingthe 2 blogs I had at Opera so…(it’s rather depressing to blog for ages and never get a single comment) I didn’t blog that much on the subject I’m discussing here but hopefully that will now change. I have been keeping a journal and hope to transfer some of it here so  you may find – dear reader -that there is more stuff appearing at the beginning of the blog than at the end, as it were.

Anyway, as you may have guessed,  I was going to take ADDMan but that’s been taken on WordPress. Since I have been suffering from panic attacks for the last year and i thought I was going mad I have chosen Maddman since ADD can feel a little mad and I’m sure I can be maddening. So I will be talking about my life being interrupted with occasional panic attacks as well living ‘with’ ADD etc Oh, and I’m from the UK so may give a different perspective on teh whole ADD, ADHD thing.

I’m wondering if this freely hosted WordPress is as  fully featured as the WordPress one can load onto one’s own server. I’m now wondering if that was a stupid question. But it is 4am. “It’s late, I’m tired and there’s so much more to do”. Who can name that quote in one?