When I was 7 years old I became very ill. I spent an entire year in the hospital.

At times I was on the brink of death. Finally I was well enough to return home. I reveled in being back with my family, animals, friends-so thankful to be alive.

But as the days went on and I started venturing out, a low rumbling, uneasiness invaded my body and mind. I had to force myself to go to school. Spending the night with friends was often more torture than fun. Bus trips, visits to relatives, parties, riding in cars with strangers, restaurants, concerts, and holiday festivities were anticipated with dread. Some days and months were easier than others and some so tough I would seal myself and go numb so I could do what I needed to do. I hid my feelings…made elaborate stories to cover my behavior. Oh, I was so good at hiding and pretending.

“What if”…was a constant statement in my mind. I had stomach upsets, unsettled bowels, sweats, irregular heart beats, shakes, my mouth was so dry…over and over my mind would say, “I’ve got to get out of here…I’ve got to get out of here. How am I going to survive this?”

The days turned into months, then years. I grew up and fell in love. With the anticipation of my wedding, the sensations became overwhelming. I barely ate. By my wedding day I weighed 87 lbs.

During my pregnancy and after the birth of my first child, the symptoms almost disappeared. It was a good time. Several years later I crashed again. This time, I dropped so low, I could no longer leave my home or take care of my family. I got pregnant again but this time my symptoms increased.

Over and over I prayed for an answer. But none came. I made a bargain with God when I said, “Dear God, if you help me get well, I promise I will help others who are suffering like me.” I knew several other members of my family had suffered most of their lives with symptoms like mine. Trying to accept my fate, I made a pact with myself that I would make it through just this one day and accomplish at least one thing I was proud of during that day…sometimes it was only to scrub the floor but I always did it. My husband became a doctor. I longed to be a doctor too but there was no way. How could I take care of others if I couldn’t take care of myself!

My husband, Dr. Ron Meyers, specialized in treating internal disorders with an emphasis on diet, exercise and nutrition. As his reputation for success increased, patients came to him from as far away as Egypt-but still no help for me.
I tried everything-cognitive therapy, hypnosis, rapid eye therapy, prayer, relaxation, behavioral modification, biofeedback, energy therapy, acupuncture, and drugs. Except for very limited use of Xanax, every drug I tried made me feel terrible.

By this time, our youngest son had started having panic attacks and depression. My husband was able to help so many of his patients. Why not his own family? He desperately wanted to help us get relief.

Together, we poured over research relating to anxiety and panic attacks. I became the guinea pig. And then after over 40 years of suffering, a wonderful thing happened…the puzzle pieces came together!!!

What joy, what relief…I wasn’t crazy. I could feel good. I could live a normal life.

(Thinking that maybe it was a fluke, we started using the system with patients in the clinic and “WOW”…They got well too.)

All those years my body had been telling me what it needed and I couldn’t understand. It was speaking a language-but it certainly wasn’t English! And because I didn’t understand, my body “screamed” louder and louder, begging me to give it what it needed. (Dr. Meyers developed a simple, easy way for his patients to understand their body’s language. You’ll learn it in the BreakFree Program)

Today, I look forward to every day. Going to work is easy, I can wait in traffic lines, cars can pile up in front and behind me totally trapping me in the drive-thru lane. I can sit in the middle seats of shows, ride with others in cars, eat in restaurants, and ride elevators. My skin doesn’t crawl, my stomach doesn’t twist, and my heart doesn’t pound erratically.

 

I’ve flown to Canada, Mexico, Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Europe in the last few years. I still stop in wonder at how well I am doing. I sometimes look for those old symptoms as I do things I could not do before and revel in the peace inside my body and mind.

Because I have the hereditary predisposition to double react to stress-like so many of you, I still have times when my body starts talking to me. But now I know what to do to quiet those symptoms and in just a short time, I’m back to normal.

How blessed I am that my prayers were answered. I intend to keep my promise to God and help others like me.

You too can regain control of your life and feel good again. Don’t suffer for 40 years like I did. Take control. Get back your life. You don’t have to be alone in this. My husband and I and others, who have suffered like you, will be there to teach and guide you.

BreakFree is clinically proven. Nearly 100% of patients are significantly improved after following the BreakFree program.

This is my heart project and here is my promise to you. Order the BreakFree Program. Make a commitment to yourself that you will give it a real chance. Read, learn, do the lessons and take the nutrients. And then, if for any reason, you don’t feel you have made substantial improvement, just send it back. I’ll refund your money…No questions asked.

You have nothing to lose but those terrible feelings inside you! Order today. It is time for you to feel good again.

Love,

Anxiety has always been in my life. I had my first panic attack when I was five years old. Like most kids, I just acclimated to this as part of my reality. It was weird for me to explain to myself, let alone others, that I just couldn’t do some things. Spending the night at friends’ houses was the first thing that became really hard for me. Not that I wouldn’t try. I had many friends and was always being invited over for sleepovers. Every few months I would try again and fight anxiety through the night. Sometimes I would throw up; sometime I would shake and cry to myself.

Sometimes I would fall asleep watching TV and never get anxious. I remember one night at some kind people’s house. We had the old tinfoil popcorn that you cooked on the stove. I must have fallen asleep on the couch still trying to watch the show that was on. The next thing I remember is waking up around two or three in the morning, moonlight was streaming through unfamiliar windows. The feel of an unfamiliar bed, clean tight sheets. It was a space that resembled where I would usually have a panic attack, but it was also different. I awoke at peace and realized that I had a choice; I could let myself fall into my old patterns and turn this beautiful seen into a personal hell. Or I could return to bed and let sleep and peace overtake me. I chose the latter, and I remember it to this day. It would be nearly two decades after that night before I would find some real measure of control over myself. But things had to get a lot worse before I could begin to make them better.

In the beginning I did what most people do, I simply avoided the situations where I had experienced anxiety. Especially if the first experience was reinforced by a second, and often faster, panic attack. Sleepovers, Japanese restaurants, hotels, it was all about where I had had panicked before. I would happily fly a plane, fly on a plane, drive in a car with unfamiliar people, go out on a fishing boat, I just never realized that these situations could produce anxiety. All the while I was compensating for the abuse my ego was taking from having anxiety by doing these amazing things that got me praised elsewhere. In fact, the things that I did often had an element of risk taking. I have heard this called counterphobic behavior. I was constantly reminding myself that I was courageous, successful, and capable.

At the peak of this behavior I loaded everything I really needed in life up in a small camper on the back of my truck and drove from California to Idaho to fly alongside the 1997 US Paragliding National Championships, not enter the actual competition, mind you, that would cause me too much anxiety. So every day I would launch with the rest of the competitors and face the most powerful updrafts I had ever felt on a Paraglider. Every day the turbulence would cause my canopy to collapse and I would fall and spin until I got it fixed, then I would be back to the racing. One day I spent a full minute falling and spiraling trying to get my paraglider untangled and flying again, I really thought I would need to throw my backup parachute (Those don’t always work). On nearly everyday of the competition the turbulence caused someone’s paraglider to become so tangled that they threw their backup parachute. On day three I had a fellow pilot die a few hundred feet beneath me. I was so busy staying alive that I never knew that we had lost him. It wasn’t until that night that I found out. He had been the pilot camping next to me.

My point to all of this is that if it were a matter or bravery that would get one past anxiety disorder, I would have beaten this a long time ago. In fact I probably contradict any stereotype that people might have about those who have panic attacks. I am social, extroverted, courageous to the point of stupidity. I forget the trauma of things quickly and am willing to try things again and again. I am adventurous, try new things constantly, and have always had success in dating and friendship. I just had panic attacks, and tended to have them where I had had them before.

It wasn’t until I was about twenty-three that I really started my steep decline, which would ultimately lead me to start my ultimate recovery.

I was getting a little too close to starting a relationship with a married woman. Something that I knew was a bad idea, and something I had always promised that I would never do. She was a great friend, had panic disorder as well, and was a very easy person for me to be around. I enjoyed showing her things in life that I found beautiful that she had never done, like fishing and scuba diving.

A sort of vague depression had fallen over my life and I was still doing adventurous things but they weren’t fulfilling me like they used to. I got careless and had severely broken my wrist and needed surgery. I did not do well with the anesthesia. I swear I could taste it at random moments for months afterward. The wrist injury limited the way that I could exercise, and the depression got slowly worse.

My relationship with my girlfriend at the time was going nowhere and we both knew it. She had anxiety as well, and we would never go anywhere because she couldn’t drive with me. My heart was growing close to the married friend that I knew I shouldn’t be with.

One night, I was over at the married friend’s house, a fire was lit in the fireplace. I was sitting on the couch with the married woman next to me. Her husband was working late as he always did and we were in her home. (In retrospect this all seems a little predictable) My heart wanted to move in a direction that my brain knew was really, really dumb. So right then and there I had the worst panic attack of my life.

It was as if there was a constant scream in my brain that wouldn’t stop, and my body was screaming as well. My heart was racing, my fingers were cold and sweating. It wasn’t the physical feelings that were so frightening; it was the mental breakdown that was terrifying. It was as if my brain was an incoherent blur of fear and speed. I tried to walk it off, but I could not get a hold of myself. The only thing that made sense was to flee. For the first time in my life running away was probably a really good idea.

The thirty-minute drive home took forever; passing each stoplight was a victory. But when I got home things really didn’t end. It was as if I was a bell that had been rung that would not stop ringing. The illusion that there was a safe place to run to was destroyed. It was finally clear that my anxiety came from within and that I had always been fooling myself into thinking the causes were external. At the time this was a terrifying realization: The source of all of my fear was me, and I can never run from me. It would be five years of near constant anxiety before I would begin to really work past this.

For me my weight was a tangible measure of how I was doing. When I felt better I could eat, when I felt worse I could not. I started this process at a very slim 185 pounds and month-by-month they slowly slipped away. After two years I was down to 140 and still dropping. My body was consuming itself and there was nothing that I could do about it. I still felt that if I could only find that one big “why” that I could turn everything around.

My turnaround came when I was finally ready to reach out for help. My life was such constant suffering that I opened the phonebook and pointed to a name of a Psychologist. I was 137 ponds and really, really, open to new ideas. He politely listened to me for forty-five minutes and said “sounds chemical, biological, there isn’t much I can do for you. You should try medication.” Mind you, this is from a guy who makes his living without medication. The ones who specialize in drugs are Psychiatrists. Considering the source, I believed him and went looking for a good Psychiatrist.

It turned out that one of the very best lived on my street, within walking distance. Her office was attached to her house. She was this unassuming Japanese-Hawaiian woman with a kind of understated approach that put me at ease. She listened very carefully and asked thoughtful questions. She prescribed something and gave me plenty of samples. It was the kind of drug that works right away and my appetite came back with a vengeance. I gained ten pounds that first week.

Even with this huge turnaround my life was far from normal. I was still of the mindset that there was one answer, one big thing that would cure me. I thought that this drug was my big answer, so when I realized that I was still struggling, I asked for a change in my medicine. I screwed myself up by doing this. This mindset cost me at least two years.

The reality was that I needed to make many small changes in my life, all over the place. It tuned out that the answers I needed were even closer that the Psychiatrist down the street.

All this time, while I was struggling, my parents were working on the BreakFree program. This was a nutrition-based approach that they were really finding success with. My father is a doctor and my mother has anxiety disorder. Between them they had created a comprehensive program that looked at anxiety in a way that I had not. They believed that anxiety was a genetic condition that could be mostly managed by replenishing basic nutrients in the body, monitoring carefully what we eat, when we eat, and what we put in our bodies. About four years into my really dark time, I finally gave their ideas a try and I began to get better right away.

Looking back on all of this, I now know I could have turned this around at any point. It would have only taken a few weeks from even my lowest point to get my life back using the skills that I have learned. Isn’t that life? Without the knowledge things seem impossible. With the knowledge-things seem easy.

Being pummeled like I was for so long was cause for me to question everything. “What had I done to deserve this?” “Have I paid enough?” “Does God hate me?” “Is there no God, and will I just disappear into this horrible disorder?” “Will I go to an insane asylum?” “Will the rest of my life look like this?” ” Do I want to live if this will never end?” Pretty heavy stuff, but everyone who has struggled like I have has felt and thought nearly all of things that went through my mind.

If you are asking similar questions I have come to these answers: Yes, this might last for the rest of your life if you do nothing about it. It might let up on its own, but it might not. Everyone, however, can get over this no matter how long that they have struggled. There are enough tools available now for everyone to get better. It is important here to note that panic creates a kind of brain-state that has you looking for one big answer, and recovery just doesn’t look like that. It is not just one thing, although one big insight can be a turning point, it is more about only a few small changes that you work into your life every day.

I tell people that they can undo a year of suffering in a week when they are working with me and have access to the best tools and advice. I took about two years to undo twenty years of struggling and five years of extreme suffering. But I was learning everything without a guide, without someone who had walked my same path and was teaching and encouraging me. Now I am that person for others. I feel profound joy in knowing that I have really made a difference in many peoples lives. This may be hard to believe, but I am glad to have gone through what I have gone through. It was all of my mistakes that help me understand what others are going through and help me guide them towards the right answers. I like who I am now, and I know that I couldn’t be who I am today without going through what I have gone through. I couldn’t help others like I do without having had this journey go this particular way.

 

When you have really faced a panic attack that punched you in the soul you will always be able to see in others if they have gone through the same thing. Not that they will wear it like a strobe light, but if you ask them, you can tell by the way that they answer. My older brother always used to be cruel to me about my anxiety as I was growing up. When he was thirty-four he had his first real panic attack. It looked like he had seen a ghost when he told me about it.

When people talk to me they know right away that I have been there. It seems to change the discussion totally. It creates a trust and openness that is very hard to find with someone who hasn’t been there, no matter what their education might be. Once you have that connection, people often feel real hope for the first time in a long time.

If you are ready to get started, which I hope that you are now, give me a call.