After the sudden jump start in the heart, your entire body will feel clammy, cold, sweaty, heavy. Your legs will start to shake, your lungs and core will tighten, you might forget to breathe, and when you do it'll be short, uncomfortable and hot. Your wrist muscles, leg muscles and chest muscles will constrict, vibrate and shake in sometimes surprisingly powerful bursts. The shaking can last consistently for up to 4 minutes, from what I've experienced so far, though it sometimes fades off for a few seconds before continuing again. It doesn't stop until the attack is over, and sometimes follows through to the end, anyway.

So now you're laying there; your heart is racing, you feel like vomiting, you're sweaty, clammy, your wrists are stinging and your entire body is shaking violently. I don't really remember what I think about during these attacks; I assume I'm thinking about whatever triggered me.

Sometimes, during this—though what I listed above is always happening, the rest below are just additives to the situation—you'll burst into tears, or feel like screaming or clawing at your chest. The clawing part is mostly just a panicked response to the turmoil your muscles are in; you might desperately squeeze your legs and massage your forearms because they're in so much pain, but won't relax.

The screaming is probably a stress reaction too, a way to release some stress. Even if you try to make a sound, you won't be able to, because your lungs are constricting so much and your throat is so tight that it just gives you more and more frustration. My usual solution to this is violently pulling on a pillow or dragging my nails down the wall; it's less of a solution and something I do, because it just gets me nowhere and brings me to tears.

The crying is relatively new. Normally I haven't been able to cry because of the constriction in the lungs and throat, but I guess now I do it. It might be a menstrual cycle thing; I'm not sure, but I hope it becomes a normal thing of panic attacks. It helps take my mind off the fact my mind is shutting down and more onto the fact that my face is getting all wet and I'm releasing stress chemicals through my eyes. And getting my face wet with them.

Eventually, eventually, this will all end. The first thing to end would be the sweating, then the clamminess, then the lung and throat constriction. The shaking can last for hours afterwards though, and when it does end, it leaves you utterly exhausted, like you just ran a marathon three times. No matter how long the shaking lasts its always incredibly exhausting because every muscle in the areas I described is as tight as it can possibly be, and still striving to be even tighter, sometimes shaking enough to make you want to rip them off just to make it stop.

Sometimes, you can have a panic attack that only lasts for 10 minutes, the minimum. These normally only come with heart/vein pains, clamminess, sweating and nausea, but the more intense ones have all the other symptoms combined. Unfortunately, almost as soon as one ends, another one begins, maybe with a 5 to 10 minute interval of catching my breath. This can repeat up to 4 times on bad nights, but normally its just 1 or 2.

type 2

Another type of panic attack is the one I prefer, even though it's a little scary in the aftermath. This normally happens when I'm triggered immediately from something I didn't expect; like my most prominent trigger, [name extracted to protect identity] screaming.

When you hear or see the trigger, you will get the biggest heart/vein pain in my life ((I claim this every time but it's always the same)), but you won't shake, and you won't react. It'll take a minute for you to register what happened; you might sweat a little, and you legs will always get weak and numb.

After this you might feel nauseous and sweat more. You'll think you're lightheaded—emphasis on “think”. It'll almost be like an out of body experience; the smallest part of you knows you're on Earth, but the rest of you thinks that everything is gone.

You can look at something, but you won't register what it is. It'll take everything in your power to even give a name to the object you're looking at, but you wont have the mental energy or capacity to do it.

If you talk to someone, you will either seem quiet, distant and closed off, or completely fine. Normally you seem completely fine, because a part of you thinks you are. You know something is wrong, but you don't know what, and your brain can't function enough for you to figure out what's wrong.

From this, you'll eventually recover, and look back on it like almost nothing was wrong. During the attack it blocks all emotions, so you'll know you've recovered once you can feel more emotional, once you can laugh or cry.

But when I look back on those attacks, still, it's a little mind-boggling to realize something was very wrong with me. Those seem tame, preferable, even though there's a little part of me in the back of my head screaming that something is wrong and I need to take care of it. It just feels like nothing is wrong, even though you know something is...but at the same time, you don't.

Sometimes, if having multiple panic attacks, the last one can end in the results of the second panic attack I described, and stay that way for a while, before recovering. Most of the time, when MULTIPLE attacks occur, that's how it happens, because your mind gives up, I guess.