For many years, Adeline, 36, has had frequent anxiety attacks, to the cut of the world.

We met her at the time of the release of her book "Farewell Dear Angels!" (Ed Payot), in which she testifies of this period difficult to manage and overcome.

The first crisis

"I was 18 years old when I had my first anxiety attack, one evening on a train platform in Sartrouville, Yvelines, and I went to join my boyfriend at the time and I said to my parents that I was going to see girlfriends, I was not afraid to take the RER late, it was part of my everyday life as a young suburban girl.

All of a sudden, I started to feel tingling in my fingers, inside my mouth, and my heart was beating faster and faster.

A pain rushed to my head like a migraine , I saw little white dots everywhere, I felt like I was going to be uncomfortable .

It only lasted a few seconds, but all these sensations that manifested at the same time made me think that I was having a heart attack . I tried to keep calm, to see who could help me around me. I did not know at all what was happening, I was frozen with fear and I felt that I was going to fall to the ground in the second. Finally, I had a boost of energy and survival, and I managed to return to my parents.

The next day, I felt better but this episode remained in a corner of my head.

Nothing foreshadowed that night a crisis of anxiety, yet it happened without warning. At the same time, when you are an 18 year old girl you are necessarily stressed. There is love, sex, studies ... We are free and at the same time, this space of freedom that opens to us can be scary. There are a lot of questions.

Basically, I'm a jovial person, certainly a little neurotic and anxious, but no more than any girl at this age. Actually I was wondering what I was going to do, what I wanted, what I could do, and what freedom I wanted.

After that, I was vigilant, watching my heart rate, my pulse.

A fear of permanent death

Over the months, the anxiety has settled up to be in me every day. Feeling a physical harm that can explode into a crisis made me more and more afraid.

Some seizures remained in the making days, weeks before they manifested themselves.

What is confusing is that we do not know when the crises will happen, so we anticipate them, we create a new routine where we avoid the places too closed, oppressive and people who are likely to provoke them .

We forget the walks in shopping centers and travel by public transport. As a result, we create phobias that we will use to prevent the anxiety comes back and everything becomes almost obsessional. We get bogged down and we do not do anything anymore.

We do not go out from home, we do not see anyone, we fail in his studies while wondering what happens to us and trying to find solutions. We change our diet, we take blood tests to see if we do not suffer from deficiencies, we will see doctors, we do scans and MRI to try to find where is the failure in the body.

You have to be aware that when you have a crisis of anxiety, you are overwhelmed by the fear of dying, you are not aware of anything, it is not rational at all. We did one the day before and yet the one we are experiencing is as if it was the first one. It's like a kind of permanent jitters.

By stressing his body to this point we come to say that we could really cause a heart attack, that these emotions will destroy our body slowly. After all, who's telling me in those moments that I'm not really dying? It's a vicious circle.

An insidious evil with which one learns to live

Mine manifested itself in two ways: either I thought I was going to choke, suffocate myself, and die. Either I was stuck and my reason had no window on the world. My brain did not see anything, I had a feeling of madness, the impression that I was going to stay in this state all my life.

Because to have the impression to be crazy and that one will remain it, it is a state which can make you want to jump by the window. And that's where it becomes dangerous. One becomes close to a depressive state .

For years I had no love life because I did not even want to do it anymore.

It is very destabilizing. For example, we say that we will do sports to relax , but in truth we are afraid to do. We say to ourselves 'if I start running, my heart will not be able to hold'. We no longer have self-confidence, so in his body and we imagine that he can let go at any time.

We learn to live with and one day when we wake up by going well, we say that it is not normal. We take things upside down. We are so used to this evil that he begins to define us. One falls limit in 'love' for his crises of anxiety. And the reason we learn to love them is because they are bearable as well.

The importance of psychological support

So I decided to go see a psychiatrist. I saw it from my 22 to my 26 years old. Initially, she gave me drugs to put things back in place - Prozac and Lexomyl. She did behavioral therapy and gave me exercises that helped me on a daily basis. For example, she asked me to take notes to describe my seizures. At the moment it was a sufficient distance between what I was experiencing and the fact of being aware of it.

I felt good in her office and had a physical need to see her several times a week. She gave me exercises that helped me on a daily basis. She gave me hypnosis sessions too. This gave new relaxing references to my body. The therapy helped me, but not treated. I have also tried alternative medicines such as acupuncture or shiatsu .

In the end, I think that nature is well done and that the crisis of anxiety is a signal and that it translates something very primitive. In my opinion, it is like a dead language and the brain can not translate it because it has forgotten how it is used. She points to annoyances and this can help us unconsciously identify what is wrong with our lives. But to understand it and start a dialogue with it, you have to be afraid of it. But it takes time.

A long road to reconstruction

Gradually, I got back into the active and social life, I wanted to have a job that made me want to go out, to have fun.

I met my companion with whom I am still today. I felt supported, I even started doing things I did not do before. I learned to trust myself. Anguish was not necessarily a part, but it was no longer a brake to do nothing. I was even surprised to move to Canada.

The day before the departure, I made a big attack of arrhythmia. I think it was due to the stress of the move. I was in the emergency room and they found me a very small heart defect, which I had apparently had for years, and which causes regular attacks of extrasystoles. It is when the heart misses a beat or makes several at the same time.

I was treated but two questions arose: 'Was this malformation caused by anxiety or if I was anxious because I felt these heart problems without being able to explain them?'

Today, I have an anxiety attack a year, it lasts a few seconds and I do not feel the symptoms anymore. I have a reflex of breathing, relaxation. I just feel a shiver that runs through my body and it's over.

But it will have taken me almost 15 years to get to this mastery there. "

"Farewell dear angst!", By Adeline Grais-Cernea, ed. Payot.