Anxiety and Panic After Drug Use

Reader’s Question

Hi, I’m 15 years old and I’m suffering from severe Anxiety/Panic Attacks. I’ve looked it all up and discovered that much, but no matter what I do, I don’t know how to quit obsessing over my anxiety. Breathing exercises don’t work…and I’m always paranoid and on edge. I’m really whiney about my anxiety and I think it bugs the people around me because they don’t understand. I feel really depressed and I don’t know how to make this stop. Why did it happen to me?? I smoked some weed back in Febuary and ever since that night I freaked out and everything went 3D and I lost feeling in my body, I’ve been experiancing these physiological issues. It’s so scary. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t exist. I’m scared… When will this stop? Will it? What can I do? Why did this start? What will help…? God…please…I’m feeling so scared. I don’t know what to do.

Thank you.

Our Consulting Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

There’s a good chance another drug was in the “weed” back in February. It’s also likely it’s out of your system by this time. What isn’t out of your system is the memory of being “freaked out”. If we think about it, being “freaked out” is a way of saying we were scared to death by something. The brain doesn’t forget that experience easily. In fact, the brain creates an “emotional memory” of the experience that can bother us every day. You’ve now developed an anxiety disorder, probably due to the experience and the physiological symptoms you had at the time. Emotional Memory, by the way, is a type of memory that contains not only details but the mood and the physiological responses that we experienced at the time the memory was made. As a result, any time you feel the slightest bit of anxiety (which is normal in daily life), your brain brings up the Emotional Memory of your February experience…and you feel it all over again. You mentally and physically relive it. It’s like being severely bitten by a dog — from that point everytime you see a large dog you have a panic reaction.

You can approach fixing this in several ways. First, understand how the brain works and how being scared to death and traumatized (technical word for it) continues to bother us long after the event. You can read my handout on Emotional Memory on this website to help you understand it. Second, you can develop anxiety-reduction methods and habits. The Internet has a lot of stress and anxiety-reducing suggestions. Lastly, if you can’t get this under control, you can discuss the issue with your parents and seek medical or mental health treatment. This can be fixed by professional treatment but it may require taking the uncomfortable step of bringing it to the attention of your parents or another adult in your life.