Trazodone gave me even worse nightmares Xanax is scarily habit-forming Clonazepam knocked me out too much, leaving me fuzzy for hours, even after a full night’s sleep. I have tried many of them - from Trazodone to Xanax to Clonazepam. Lots of people have panic attacks, actually, though few have more than one or two severe ones in their lives.Īs with anything else, there are pills that address panic. Factors like genetics, extreme stress, and a particular inclination towards anxiety all play a part. No one fully understands the cause of panic attacks or their accompanying diagnosis, panic disorder. Of course, there are definitions for this, clinical language, pathologies. Whenever my routine changed, when I slept somewhere new or pulled an all-nighter, I paid for it with at least one night of nearly unbearable dread. Though I stopped having panic attacks every single night as soon as I came home to my familiar bed, they still visited me throughout high school and college. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or silly. I loved my grandparents, but dreaded those nights, eyes wide, breath shallow, bathed in terror. The attacks returned nearly every night during those long weeks. As soon as I heard my grandmother in the kitchen, turning on The Today Show and pouring juice, I fell into a deep sleep. My early-to-bed grandparents were, thank goodness, also early to rise. I didn't know it yet, but I was having a panic attack.ĭawn came eons later. Up until that moment, I had never felt so certain I was about to die. I lay there, pinned to the bed, drenched, shaking, my heart feeling constantly like it was about to either leap out of my chest - or just stop beating. Each person I loved died a hundred grisly deaths in my head. The black-tongued woman and all the witches visited me, real to me in the dark room. Chronic nightmares came to life that night.
Some came from movies - I remember envisioning blood pouring out of an elevator, a skeletal, longhaired girl clawing her way out of a TV set. The first night, I lay in the beautiful guest room with twin beds reserved for grandchildren, acutely aware of the emptiness of the other bed.
To cope with my creeping fear, I read the books I found on their shelves - everything from early editions of Winnie the Pooh to The Da Vinci Code - but inevitably, it was time to go to sleep. I wasn’t exactly a night owl, but they went to bed way before my bedtime. Though I was always a tightly-wound kind of kid, I didn’t develop full-blown panic attacks until my early teen years, when I was staying with my grandparents in Mobile, Alabama for the summer. I’d watch the glowing green numbers till the gray pre-dawn, when I’d finally fall asleep, awakening just a couple of hours later, sweaty from bad dreams. If I fall asleep now, I’ll get five hours of sleep, I’d think, forever counting backwards from a morning I was sure would never come. I’d stare at the digital clock on the microwave, watch as it moved through the wee hours. On the floor of my friend Katie's living room, I watched as she and my sister curled up in sleeping bags on either side of me, their breathing steady and peaceful. The only thing worse than the dreams was not falling asleep at all. Away from home, I suffered from terrible nightmares, dreams of a woman with long fingernails and a black, forked tongue sitting at the edge of my bed, of witches who emerged in the moonlight. It was the part of sleepovers when you quit singing along to Disney songs on your friend’s little cassette player and finally went to sleep that petrified me. It wasn’t being away from home that bothered me - I was perfectly capable of leaving my parents and familiar routines behind. I was terrified of sleepovers as a little girl.