Hi, my name is Stephanie and today I wanted to talk to you about the
difference between an anxiety attack and a meltdown. Now, if you're not sure what a
meltdown is in the first place, I'm gonna go ahead and link you either up here or
down here to the video I did on what meltdowns and shutdowns are, so you'll
want to check that out first. So, I ran across a video where this girl was
talking about being newly diagnosed and she was talking about where she would
have anxiety attacks and she didn't realize what she was doing was hand
flapping. So, she thought she was just being dramatic by doing this. I don't
recall if it was her or someone in the comments, but somebody said that they
weren't sure what the difference between an anxiety attack and a meltdown were.
For me, meltdowns and anxiety attacks have a different feeling about them.
So, with meltdowns I typically can see, kind of, it building up. I can usually
feel that I'm kind of heading towards a meltdown. Now with a meltdown, of course, I
am out of willful control. I'm able to recognize that things are happening with
my body, I'm just not really in willful control. It's almost like I'm also an
observer of the situation, kind of. So, for example, if I were screaming, I would
realize that screaming was happening, and then I'd realized that I was the one
doing it. For a meltdown, there's also usually a lot of action going on, whether
it's vocal, like screaming, or physical like pulling or scratching or kicking or
hitting - anything like that. Those sorts of actions happen a lot with meltdowns.
For me, it feels like a switch has been flipped that I usually try to
desperately keep from being flipped, but it just kind of happened and somehow it
got flipped and this stuff is just going on. But for me, an anxiety attack comes
out of completely nowhere. I usually don't know the actual trigger for it. Not
that meltdowns seem to have one that I can peg down all the time, either, but
with anxiety attacks, it feels like it went from
zero to sixty like that, and it feels like, almost, like cold water in waves,
like, washing over me and just, like, through my body I can feel it, like, in
all of my nerves and everything like that. And usually it blindsides me
completely and I don't know what's happening, but all of a sudden, it's just,
like, washing over me and I'm usually, like, crying and can't breathe or
hyperventilating, basically. And I'll feel really weak and can't usually stand on
my own in that situation. And with those, it usually kind of washes in and washes
out for me. I don't typically immediately recover, but it doesn't take too long. I
probably have to lay down for like ten minutes or something like that and I'll
be pretty much back to normal, even though I feel like really tingly and
exhausted. I experience both meltdowns and anxiety attacks, but I tend to
typically experience meltdowns and shutdowns in the smaller forms. For me,
I've seen anxiety being almost like an all-or-nothing kind of thing, where maybe
if it's more severe, it's just lasting longer. Now, looking online about anxiety
attacks for this video, I do see that it seems like they count things that are
lesser as anxiety attacks - I'm coming from the perspective of being so used to
having anxiety all the time that it almost seems normal,
but I guess maybe a more minor anxiety attack might just be like when
everything all of a sudden becomes almost like you're hyper aware of every
little thing and maybe your mind is kind of spinning a little bit. And all of a
sudden you're just like, I need to get out of here. Because I do experience that at
the grocery store, especially Aldi, so. Again, I'm not gonna say that that
sensation is necessarily anxiety or a meltdown, just because I'm not sure where
that lies. Something I'd like to note, though, is that self-soothing is pretty
normal for both anxiety attacks and meltdowns, kind of the aftermath, maybe.
Just like stimming, self-soothing actions can look a little odd from the outside
observer. This could be like rubbing your skin or like maybe even, like, pulling or
twisting your hair. Some people like, from the scalp, sometimes that
relieves me a little bit, just like pulling on my hair from the scalp, or
like when you stroke your face to calm yourself down or your head, or sometimes
even like mild soft rocking - stuff like that. Things that might even be
considered stims normally. And this is normal coming from both the non-autistic
and the autistic. So for people experiencing an anxiety attack, they
might employ self-soothing techniques that they don't employ normally because
they just went through a very unpleasant experience. So, I hope this video helped
you understand maybe the difference between how an anxiety attack and a
meltdown feel, for me, at least and a few other people, I noticed they kind of
agree with that. I'm interested in how you feel about that. If you can tell the
difference between your anxiety attacks and your meltdowns, etc. Let me know in
the comments below. If you enjoyed this video, please do give it a thumbs up and
I hope that I will be seeing you in my next video. If you haven't subscribed
already, go ahead and do that. I post to this channel every Thursday at 4 p.m.
Central Standard Time. I hope that you're having a wonderful week.
Bye!