CASE STUDY THE NURSE WITH ANXIETY ATTACKS AT WORK

A young nurse called Merope came to my surgery complaining that she’d started having anxiety attacks at work. Seemingly out of the blue, her breathing would become rapid, and she’d feel a tingling sensation in her fingers. The last straw came when she was trying to take blood from a patient and she started shaking, needle in hand. The patient filed a complaint.

I tried to understand a bit more about what was going on in Merope’s life. She’d been struggling to sleep: “I’m just lying in bed most of the night with my thoughts going around, worrying what I might have got wrong and what I’ve got to do the next day.”

I asked her if she had anyone in her life that she could offload to and talk about her worries with, but she told me that, because of her work’s erratic hours, she didn’t see many people socially.

I suggested that Merope start each morning doing a download exercise, writing down all her thoughts on a piece of paper. At first, she found the process a little odd. But when she lost a bit of that initial selfconsciousness, you couldn’t stop her.

She began starting her day with a clearer, calmer head, and the benefits of that calmness fed forward into the whole of the rest of the day. The knowledge that she was going to download the stresses of the day when she got up allowed her to leave them alone at night-time.

She began sleeping better. Within a couple of months, the frequency of her attacks had reduced by around 70 per cent, and those she did have were less severe and more manageable.