How do panic attacks feel (from the first person)?

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How do panic attacks feel? Please share your experience from the first person if you had one. Reading symptoms from an encyclopedia is one thing, but reading how it feels like to experience one from the first person is completely different.

'Feel' as in physically or as in how you mentally feel about the situation?
physically: it feels like my chest becomes very heavy and pushes against my lungs which makes it very hard to breathe. I try to breathe but the more I try the more I choke. Also, a feeling of pressure in my throat like you have when you can't eat because of stress, just worse and almost painful.
mentally: fear. Imagine somebody standing behind your back with a knife ready to stab you, but no matter how far you run away or whatever you do he's always there and you can't make him go away. That's the best description I can give you.

I'm going to try and explain this, but I'm going to have to list stuff:

1. Extreme sudden chest tightness and heart pounding like their is a drum in my chest and my lungs constrict
2. Eye sight can go fuzzy
3. Extreme ear ringing/Tinitus
4. Body rocking, shaking at least slightly etc. due to feeling my nerves suddenly burning and shaking in place underneath my skin
5. Overall, and sudden emotional terror

My chest feels tight and I feel short of breath. My heart starts racing, and I start to feel anxious about it, which causes a shot of adrenaline that makes all the symptoms worse. I get dizzy and sometimes I dissociate a bit and everything becomes a bit unreal.

I often feel like I'm about to drop dead from a heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage.

What happens is: Something triggers an anxiety reaction that causes the muscles in your chest to contract, putting pressure on your lungs. Everything that follows is anxiety and the consequences of anxiety. I've found that breathing deeply and slowly and taking time to defuse the fears ("This is a panic attack, I am not about to drop dead") can stop many panic attacks.

Unfortunately, what triggers the panic attacks can sometimes be hard to cope with - but those can be just about any physical sensation. I've had it triggered by my migraine auras (dizziness), normal fatigue, pain caused by my fibromyalgia (this is probably responsible for 90% of my emergency room visits ), hunger, nausea, mingled hunger and nausea, and trying to go to sleep.

Strangely, actual shortness of breath caused by exertion never seems to trigger it - a good thing.

Anyway, I used to have several a day, and one period I had non-stop panic attacks for a full month, during which I developed so many strange somatic symptoms that I couldn't rationalize my way out of them. The only thing that worked was taking clonazepam, which stopped the attacks entirely. They'd come right back after it wore off, however. This was during a really high-stress period while I was going to college and trying to do freelance work at the same time, and the end consequence was losing the work and dropping out. I haven't had anything nearly as bad since, and can defuse a lot of incipient attacks.

For me....

Insanely dry mouth and a feeling like someone shoved a wad of cotton down my throat...making it hard to breathe.

I'm not sure if what I feel would count as a panic attack because it's always got a clear identifiable trigger, but anyway...

My vision narrows, my body freezes. It feels like everything just stops for a moment and I can't move, I need to escape the situation but I can't move well enough to run away so instead I try to escape by being unresponsive and by staring at one thing until the rest of the world goes away. I'll often get floaters across my vision and it'll get kind of blurry. And I hear things differently, it's like I haven't lost any acuity but the sounds just fall into a 'void' instead of triggering a reaction of some kind. If someone's talking to me I hear them and understand what they say but it doesn't trigger any thoughts or emotions in me. (It will later, though - often after coming out of this state I'll tell my parents that I found them saying XYZ really hurtful.) My heart tends to beat really fast but I don't feel it the way I do when I'm having a meltdown (which is a more active panic reaction with a compulsive drive to do something instead of freezing).

Heart racing
Shallow breathing
Face goes pale
Shaky and clammy hands
Tightness in throat, like I'm about to start gagging
A feeling of dread, like something very bad is about to happen but I don't know what it is

You are ridiculously afraid for no apparent reason out of nowhere.
You go all cold and tingly.
You feel like you are having a heart attack.
Breathing is impossible.
You fall to the floor. (Sometimes, others just sit.)
And this horrible apocalyptic feeling like there is something you cant shake, but cant quite put your finger one.

And lots of shaking.

sudden tightness in the chest
can't breathe
can't move/function properly
feel cold
heart starts racing
butterflies in the stomach

Everybody else is pretty close to mine. I'll say in addition that I can go to my room, curl up on my bed, and ride them out by physically freezing in foetal position, though it seems to last forever. My doctor has given me an "as needed" Xanax prescription for them, and if I can notice an anxiety buildup in time (the pills take half an hour to work) they work perfectly, except that I'm too "stoned" to drive -- but after they wear off that way, I'm fine and the panic doesn't come back until next time. Sometimes they hit suddenly out of nowhere, and then I can take a pill, lie down, freeze and watch the clock. If I don't have a pill, someone's arm around me and talking quietly to me helps. Sometimes mine have a trigger, like a wasp flying through the room (I'm not normally phobic about them, or allergic to them), or a plane going over low, sometimes they just happen. I have a theory that a nightmare (from which I wake up yelling) is a panic attack that happens to happen when I happen to be asleep.

My chest gets tight sometimes. Other times, I just want to hide in a small space (under a desk, behind furniture, in a closet) and just cry. The thought of DOING much of anything is too much.

Sometimes mine are due to fairly reasonable "major" triggers. Other times, something as innocuous as a rainy day will have me in tears and totally overwhelmed and unable to function. That day, I couldn't handle the thought of going out in the rain to pick my kids up from school. I was obsessing on the feeling of getting wet and cold. I just sat on the couch, huddled under a blanket, rocking myself and crying. Now, I do have fibromyalgia also, so rainy weather is not pleasant for me, but doesn't generally make me panic. Luckily, I live in Arizona, so I don't have to deal with rain very often.

I have a prescription for Ativan to use when I need it. For a while, I was using it at least once a day. Right now, it has been about 2-3 months since I have needed it.

Are you all able to walk home (and perform all the actions and interactions needed for it) while you're having a panic attack if you're, say, about 300 m away from it?

once when i was 17, i was intoxicated on marijuana that i accepted to eat a few hours before, and i was driving over the sydney harbour bridge, and i suddenly became freaked out.

i realized that no other consciousness in the universe saw the universe from my exact perspective.
i realized that no one's eyes were in the same place looking at the same things as my eyes.

therefore i realized that no part of the entirity of my whole internal experience has ever been, or will ever be experienced by anyone else.

that was a chilling realization, and i thought i was going insane, so i had to get the car across the bridge, and into a side street where i could park and think, and the chore of doing that seemed insurmountable. i felt very disoriented by what i had just realized, and i had to adopt a "tunnel" vision approach to getting the car off the freeway.

i felt as if i was going to go insane completely in a short while, and i eventually got off the freeway and parked, and i thought...,
and i thought....

after a while, even though i could not "understand" my way out of my sudden philosophical predicament , i was starting to feel confident that i could make it home if i waited a few minutes.

in the mean time (and earlier), i had gotten out of my car, and i was wandering around aimlessly, and when i finally decided "yes i can do it", i realized i had no idea where the car was, and i could not find it.

there was luckily a train station (milson's point) near by and so i went home by train and taxi, and the next day i woke up refreshed and i knew exactly where the car was, so i caught a cab directly there, and i drove home.

i never really resolved my original philosophical dilemma, but my concern about it healed rapidly.

After seeing how all of you described panic attacks, I just realized that I have them. I never knew what they were. I though that you had to feel like you are suffocating for it to be a panic attack. I don't get that, but I do get all of the other sympoms. I've had panic attacks my whole life and just found out what they were right now.

I used to have panic attacks back in 2006/2007. I remember it feeling like the ground was rolling underneath my feet. My head spun, my vision narrowed, I felt as if I would throw up even though I hadn't eaten all day, my knees felt weak and my breathing became shallow. But the thing that stuck with me most was the all-consuming fear. I was convinced I was about to freak out or faint or literally go insane. You don't know where the fear comes from and it makes no sense at all, but I was absolutely sure I was about to go mad. I only had panic attacks in crowded places (concert venues, mostly) and I was so socially anxious I'd never draw any attention to myself, no matter what, but I'm sure that if not for sheer stubbornness, I would probably have screamed and hyperventilated too.

I used to draw attention to myself on purpose to induce the situations that would cause this. It was my own version of emersion therapy (this was before I took psychology courses and learned that emersion therapy actually was something that existed). I'm not sure if it helped or made things worse. All I know for sure is that I did not fit into any group growing up. I'm always amazed that I had any friends growing up,... but they were about as weird as I am.