Like Prince Harry I know the terror of panic attacks – here’s how I cured mine

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.

It’s a terror so great it’s hard to accurately describe in plain black and white. Everyone experiences them slightly differently but, for me, they felt like I was drowning, sinking deep underwater and unable to breathe. Every nerve strains, your heart pounds ferociously, hurting, and – and this is common, as Alison Hammond discovered this month – it feels as though you’re having a heart attack.

Some believe they are dying. Others sweat, shake, feel dizzy or sick, a few hallucinate. The worst of it is there’s no real threat – nothing to threaten your survival or that warrants such a bizarre and unwelcome body and brain reaction. And, on many levels, you know it. In short, you are having a panic attack.

This week Prince Harry spoke out about the panic attacks he experienced while performing royal duties, alongside his issues with grief, anxiety and depression following the death of his mother, Princess Diana. Speaking to neuroscientist Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor for her education series, Masterclass, in an episode entitled Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss, ahead of today’s World Mental Health Day, the Duke of Sussex described the panic that arose from taking part in public engagements, and specifically from putting on a dress shirt.

“The tightening of the collar literally felt like I was suffocating, and I would be experiencing panic attacks just in the car on the way to work,” he said. “And that’s when I realised, okay, there’s something bigger, there’s something else that you need to look into here.”

After leaving the UK and relocating to Canada, briefly, before heading to California, he had an enormous adrenaline crash – “something that I’d never experienced before’”- and slipped into two weeks of depression.

Earlier this month, ITV’s Alison Hammond was rushed to hospital while live on air for This Morning due to heart palpitations and a suspected heart attack. She resurfaced on Instagram the next day saying it had been “a little panic attack” and that it was the scariest thing she’d ever been through.

Others, such as Zoe Ball, Will Young, Alexandra Shulman and Joe Lycett, have all spoken out about experiencing them. Although we’d like to pretend they don’t exist, panic attacks are common, caused by the brain’s alarm system – our fight-or-flight response – triggering an almighty surge of fear, and stress hormones that can last up to twenty minutes in some cases.

Studies show they will affect more than one in ten of us in our lifetime and some things can make you more susceptible, including a family history of panic, hypersensitivity, exposure to trauma, other health conditions such as low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia), phobias and hormone fluctuations.

In rarer cases people have repeated panic attacks (often occurring out of the blue), known as panic disorder, a condition that affects roughly one per cent of the population and can lead to avoidance of certain places or situations. That is why a third of those with panic disorder have agoraphobia, a fear of being somewhere you cannot escape from or get help, often choosing to not leaving the house or daring to set foot in a supermarket.

Contrary to the belief of many, panic attacks are neither self-inflicted nor manufactured for attention. “They are extremely debilitating and very hard to predict and control,” explains Oliver Robinson, professor of neuroscience and mental health at University College of London.

Mental health is highly stigmatised because we all make a false dichotomy between brain and body. This leads us to think that things that are ‘all in the mind’ are things that we can control. But just as you can’t control whether or not you get cancer, a cold or other ‘bodily’ illnesses, you can’t control your mental health.

While we don’t understand the exact neurological mechanisms of panic, experts know certain brain regions light up, including the medial prefrontal cortex (responsible for emotional processing and decision-making), amygdala (responsible for processing fear) and insula (linked to sensory experience and emotion).

“This network will feed into the rest of the body and do things like promote an increase in heart rate or increase respiration which will in turn feedback into the brain in a kind of reciprocal loop,” ,” explains Professor Robinson, adding that the good news is that there are things you can do to moderate and mitigate panic attacks.

“As for any type of illness, of course, there are things you can do that promote health and reduce risk of relapse.”

My panic attacks began in the face of prolonged insomnia. At worst, I’d have multiple panic attacks a night. In 2019, not long before being diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), I’d find myself alone at night – I’d removed myself from my husband and our small child into a loft bedroom – screaming into a pillow so I wouldn’t wake anyone up. For months (if not years) sleep had become increasingly less possible and I was getting sicker with various maladies – flu, infections, gastro-issues – as my immune system faltered after another night of three hours sleep. It was a twilight zone of despair and horror. My life, I felt, was falling apart. I felt trapped, unable to ask for help, with panic rising despite being safely ensconced in bed – the ultimate paradox.

Eventually, after three months spent in a psychiatric hospital, I learned some important things about panic: the first being, despite what they feel like, panic attacks do not mean you are dying and they aren’t dangerous; second, you are not going crazy, your symptoms are the result of catastrophic thoughts and patterns of behaviour (which can be changed).

Realising this in itself, as it turned out, was half the battle. Dr Nick Grey, psychologist at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and The Oxford Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma (OxCADAT), an Oxford University research centre, says psychological therapies – cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) or exposure therapy, when you’re gradually exposed to the thing you fear – are recommended for treating panic.

“Overcoming panic and related worry requires an understanding of what happens in panics,” he says, “plus application of techniques that will initially help you control your panic attacks when they happen, and later will ideally stop the panics happening at all.’

Ultimately, your brain and body have to start trusting each other again – which is not always a quick fix. Some techniques Dr Grey teaches include examining the evidence for your frightening thoughts, learning how adrenaline affects your body (and why this reaction can’t hurt you, even if it feels horrible), as well as learning how to challenge and detach from fearful thoughts or images in the moment.

Given how highly individual our brains and fears are, tackling panic attacks needs an individualised approach, ideally working with a therapist. But some people – me included – have found slow, deep breathing exercises help reset the nervous system and reduce cortisol levels more widely. Others use the 5-4-3-2-1 technique: a grounding exercise where you notice five things you are see, four things you can hear, three that you can touch, two that you can smell and one taste, to distract and row away from panic. Others avoid coffee, smoking and alcohol if they feel susceptible, which can help too.

A girl I met in hospital would put on headphones and listen to music to stave off panic attacks. Another took off their shoes to feel grass underfoot. For Prince Harry, therapy helped him to develop his own coping mechanisms, including recognising and accepting his grief at losing his mother aged 12, something he’d run from for years.

Once I started sleeping better again (thanks to medication as well as CBT) my panic attacks evaporated – and I haven’t seen them again. I found that knowing you might not fix or cure panic attacks in an instant, and that they are common and not harmful, can be strangely liberating. You are not malfunctioning. What you are experiencing has been experienced by many before you, which, admittedly makes them no less pleasant. In the words of the panic-prone author Scott Stossel: ‘A panic attack is interesting in the way a broken leg or kidney stone is interesting – a pain that you want to end.’

How to Eat an Elephant: The Life-changing Power of Managing Anxiety, One Bite at a Time by India Sturgis (£16.99, Thorsons) is available now.

Join our commenting forumJoin thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in