How I beat severe vertigo, dizziness and depersonalization

A couple of weeks back I went through the worst incident probably in my entire life;
I was at a party from work, lots of alcohol, weed and even heavier drugs..
I hadnt smoked weed for maybe 10 years, but decided to give it a try and most likely I had over done it... within 15 minutes I experienced a full blown panic attack and extreme paranoia, literally thought everyone in that room is gonna stab me to death. For a while I felt like I died, really hard to describe the insane feeling. Also, that was abroad on a project away from home, so this added to the misery, the high lasted all night.
I literally felt like trapped in some other dimension in a body that died, freaking crazy.
After that night I developed severe vertigo, dizziness and worst of all the feeling like I am trapped in a different dimension did not go away now a week after the incident. I couldnt walk properly, perform at work, sleep, lost weight and became depressed. For a while I thought I fucked up some neurons in my brain and Im done for good. This has taken weeks now and no improvement.
I suspected this might be some crazy TMS symptom imperative but due to the incident and how it related to it I did not much believe it.
Needless to say, after googling like a manic I found a couple of threads on reddit and even youtube videos about people going through the same, I learned that the insane feeling is called depersonalization and some people can get it after getting high on weed. That helped ease the anxiety a bit. I also found some threads on this site of people who had vertigo as a tms symptom, howard schubiner talked about it as well.
So how I recovered?
I simply stopped looking for a solution. I completely stopped googling, thinking about it or giving it any attention. Whenever a thought about the crazy incident would pop up I would shift my attention away. I still had bad dizziness and depersonalization, but I stopped buying into it and tried to continue functioning just like before I developed it. Without even realizing it gradually just disappeared, now I am totally back to normal.
In other words, I genuinely applied the concept of outcome independence

 

You’re an inspiration. I’ve private messaged you asking for guidance with a very similar experience to yours.

 

This is a great example of how something that may seem "structural" (a bodily response to a substance) can end up not resolving the way it should due to the mind-body connection/TMS. I've spoken about this before - people who have issues like depersonalization after using antidepressants, cannabis, etc. need to stay calm. Your body is designed to heal (including your neurons), but when you don't believe you're going to heal and/or you become fearful of and obsessed with the idea of not healing, your sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive. That's when the symptoms stay longer than they should. Subreddits and other sites dedicated to depersonalization are notorious for creating more fear. You see people talking about changing everything from their workout regime to their diet and more, but rarely any talk about simply relaxing the sympathetic nervous system. And that's too bad, because it's the most important thing you can do!

People need to remember that your sympathetic nervous system releases cortisol and continues the cycle of neurotransmitter downregulation, resulting in more depersonalization (which is nothing more than a symptom of anxiety). It'll go away when the body is relaxed.

I'm glad you're better! Thank you for sharing your story. I'm sure it'll help a lot of people in similar situations. I wish I had read it when I was going through antidepressant withdrawal and also scared that the neurons in my brain were permanently destroyed - I ended up searching the internet for months until I found a YouTube video on anxiety symptoms and how you've just got to carry on.

 

Agree with all here that this story is a great example of how "acceptance" is such a huge tool in working with mind-body symptoms, anxiety etc.

Congratulations to you CarboNeVo for bringing into a new situation what you already knew about how fear exacerbates TMS --with success.

 

Congrats bud, You've truly inspired me! Thanks for posting this!