How I deal with panic and anxiety during the summer months and hay fever season

I think most people that suffer with anxiety and panic dread summertime and hay fever season, even if they love the sunshine and long daylight hours.  I know I feel that way about it every year, even though I consider myself pretty well recovered these days.

There was a time in the early years of my journey with anxiety that it seemed like I was always going through the worst of it in the height of summer, and that was far from easy to deal with.  In 2010 I first started to get panic attacks and periods of anxiety right at the start of summer, and then in the summer months of 2011 I suffered my nervous breakdown and had to endure some of the worst days of anxiety I have ever been through in a scorching hot July, while in 2012 I was trying to recover from agoraphobia and found myself attempting to get back to work in the summer months, which proved to be a huge challenge that was made even harder by long hot days in the city.

When you suffer from panic attacks the big thing that can affect you is that you suddenly get very hot and bothered, and you can feel as though there is no air and that you can’t breathe.  This can be made incredibly difficult to deal with when its already extremely warm outside and we are having to exert ourselves in that heat.  Just the feeling that we are getting too hot can make us think that we are on the verge of a panic attack, and that’s when the fear sets in.

I am one of many hay fever sufferers and I also find that the symptoms that come with it of congestion, blocked ears and a fuzzy head also trigger my anxiety a lot.  I think it is that feeling of being spaced out and not quite with it, along with the slight difficulty in breathing of congestion that reminds me of a panic attack, and that’s when I start to get anxious.

My hay fever is particularly bad today as the pollen counts are very high, but I forced myself outside despite feeling very congested.  As I queued up in a shop I found myself on the verge of a panic as I started feeling very unwell from the hay fever, but I forced myself to stand there and not to give in to the feelings.

I think the thing that has helped me most to deal with anxiety during the warm months is to kind of explain the feelings to myself when they are getting too much, or when I feel like I am on the verge of panicking.  If it is a very warm day and I feel myself overheating and I sense anxiety creeping in as my temperature goes up, I will tell myself that I am getting hot because it is a warm summers day and not because I am about to have a panic attack.  On the days that I find myself struggling to walk around the supermarket without getting dizzy because I am so congested with hay fever, I remind myself that I am a bit unsteady because my ears are blocked with congestion and not because I am about to pass out with anxiety.  I Just find that giving a bit of a rational explanation to how I am feeling stops the anxious part of my mind from building things up into worse scenarios than what is actually happening.

The summer months have definitely been the biggest hurdle to overcome during my journey with anxiety, but I know that every year I get a little bit better at dealing with it and I find myself hiding away from it all a lot less.  I am still hoping they find that cure for hay fever though!