I am always feeling dizzy and faintish.....?

Question

I think it might be anxiety. I always feel this way when im in a big group of people... i get light headed.. and feel like i might have a panic attack... is there anything i can take or do to make this go away????

Answer 1

May be you need to take some iron supplement.

I have some notes on the "what" "why" and "how" of anxiety.
Maybe this will help...

THE LONELINESS AND ANXIETY OF MAN

The Hollow People
Loneliness
Anxiety and the Threat to the Self
What is Anxiety?

The major, inner problems of people in our day are:
People’s disturbances (threat of wars, draft and economic uncertainty, etc.

Symptoms of disturbances (described by the people) are:
1.Unhappiness
2.Inability to decide about marriages or vocation
3.General despair and meaninglessness in their lives

The common cause of the problem:
Beginning of 20th century
Sigmund Freud - the person’s difficulty in accepting the instinctual sexual side of life and the resulting conflict between sexual impulses and social taboos.
In 1920’s
Otto Rank – write the underlying roots of the problem at that time are: feelings of inferiority, inadequacy and guilt.
In 1930’s
The focus of psychological conflict shifted again; Karen Horney pointed out was hostility between individuals and groups often connected with the competitive feelings of who gets ahead of whom.

The Hollow People
The chief problem of people in the middle decade of the 20th century is emptiness. The author not only means that many people do not know what they want; they often do not have any clear idea of what they feel. When they talk about lack of autonomy, or lament their inability to make decisions – difficulties, which are present in all decades – it soon becomes evident that their underlying problem is that they have no definite experience of their own desires or wants. They feel swayed this way and that, with painful feelings of powerlessness, because they feel empty. In marriage problem, people do not talk long before they make it clear that they expect marriage partner, real and hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she doesn’t.

An example: People can talk fluently about what they should want – to complete college degrees successfully, to get a job, to fall in love and get married and raise a family. But it is soon evident, even to them, that they are describing what others (parents, professors, employers, etc.) expect of them rather than what they themselves want. This hollow person is just like a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of him.

Man is speaking unclearly what he really wants. An example is a person who came for psychological help did not know what he wanted or felt, it generally could be assumed that he wanted something quite definite, such as some sexual gratification, but he dared not admit this to himself. As Freud made it clear, the desire was there; the chief thing necessary was to clear up the repressions, bring the desire into consciousness, and eventually help the patient to become able to gratify his desire in accord with reality. The most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feelings about sex itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is empty, and vacuous experience.

Another example is the dream of a young woman that illustrates the dilemma of the “mirror” person. She was quite emancipated sexually, but she wanted to get married and could not choose between two possible men. One man was the steady, middle class type, of whom her well –to-do family have approved; but the other shared more of her artistic and Bohemian interests. In the course of her painful bouts of indecision, during which she could not make up he mind as to what kind of person she really was and what kind of life she wished to lead. In a dream she is guided in a votation of people whom to choose and felt relieved. The only trouble was when she awoke she couldn’t remember which way the vote had gone.

Perhaps some readers are conjecturing that this emptiness, this inability to know what one feels or wants, is due to the fact that we live in a time of uncertainty-a time of war, military draft, economic change, with a future of insecurity facing us no matter how we look at it. So no wonder one doesn’t know what to plan and feels futile. Furthermore, war, economic upheaval and social change are really symptoms of the same underlying condition in our society, of which the psychological problems discussed are also symptoms.

The problem of modern man’s inner emptiness is not only observed in psychologists and psychoanalysts’ rooms but also indicated cropping out in different ways in our society. According to Riesman, the typical American individual was “inner-directed”. He had taken over the standards he was taught, was moralistic in the late Victorian sense, and had strong motives and ambitions, derived from outside though they were. He lived as though he were given stability by an inner gyroscope. This was the type, which fits the early psychoanalytic description of the emotionally repressed person who is directed by a strong super-ego. But the present typical American character according to Riesman is “outer-directed”. He seeks not to be outstanding but to “fit-in”; he lives as though he were directed by a radar set fastened to his head perpetually telling him what other people expect of him. This radar types gets his motives and directions from others, like the “mirror person”, who has no effective center of motivation of his own.

We do not mean to imply an admiration for the inner-directed individuals of the late Victorian period. Such persons gained their strength by internalizing external rules, by compartmentalizing will power and intellect and by repressing their feelings. The gyroscope is an excellent symbol for them since it stands for a completely mechanical center of stability. The gyroscope men often had disastrous influences on their children because of their rigidity, dogmatism, and inability to learn and to change. If we see clearly that the gyroscope method of gaining psychological power was unsound and eventually self-defeating, and their inner direction a moralistic substitute for integrity rather than integrity itself, we shall be the more convinced of the necessity of finding a new center of strength within ourselves.

Society has not yet found something to replace the gyroscope man’s rigid rules. This is supported by several examples of emptiness experienced by middle classes. It pictures a tired and bored man in his routinary life. The bus driver in Bronx simply drove away in his empty bus one day and was picked up by the police several days in Florida. He explained that having gotten tired of driving the same route everyday, he had decided to go away on a trip. Many in Bronx understood this situation. Solid citizens of Bronx even make the auto thief a hero because many in that place felt emptiness.

In some circles, emptiness is even made a goal to be sought after, under the guise of being adaptable. An example of this is the role of wives in corporate executives depends on whether the wife fits the pattern. The is manifested by the character of the good wives that are passive by not doing things, by not complaining if their husbands works too much and arrives home late, by not engaging in any controversial activity.

The meaninglessness of boredom of people, the emptiness has moved from a state of boredom to a state of futility and despair, which holds promise of dangers. Human being cannot live long in a condition of emptiness if not changed may turn eventually to destructive activities.

Psychological origin of this experience of emptiness comes from the people’s feelings that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the world they live in.

Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.

People today are no longer living under the authority of the church or moral laws, but under “anonymous authority” like public opinion. This authority is the public itself, which is a collection of many individuals each with his radar set adjusted to finding out what the others expect of him. We are in the long run afraid of our own collective emptiness.

The dangers of emptiness & powerlessness are that it leads to painful anxiety and despair if not corrected, to futility and blocking off of the precious qualities of the human being.

Loneliness

Another characteristic of modern people is loneliness. Loneliness is a feeling described as one of being on the outside, isolated and feeling alienated. The feelings of emptiness and loneliness go together. The reasons for the close relation between loneliness and emptiness are not difficult to discover because they belong to the same basic experiences of anxiety.

Perhaps we can recall the anxiety brought about by the first atom bomb that exploded in Hiroshima, when we sensed our grave danger – sensed, that we might be the last generation – but did not know in which direction to turn.

Feelings of loneliness occur when one feels empty and afraid not simply because one wants to be protected by the crowd. Here we wish only to point out that part of the feeling of loneliness that man needs relation with other people in order to orient himself.

Another important reason for the feeling of loneliness is the society’s requirement on being socially accepted. Thus we have to prove we are a social success by being forever sought after and never being alone. Well-liked individuals are usually considered as the socially successful ones.

The reverse side of modern man’s loneliness is his great fear of being alone. Temporary solitude is permissible but if it is seek for its own joys, then public says something is going wrong.

People have been afraid of loneliness and tried to escape it. Pascal observed that the great efforts people make to divert themselves to enable people to avoid thoughts of them.

The fear of loneliness in our society is manifested by the continual talk not bothered much on what is said as long as there is communication for silence is a great crime, for silence is lonely and frightening.

Very few do not have fear of death. Death served as a symbol of ultimate separation, aloneness, and isolation from the human beings. This fear of isolation may be very extreme but in our day to day experiences, most of us fear of being alone may not crop up in suddenly in intense form very often. Our fear of loneliness may not be shown by anxiety as such, but by subtle thoughts which pop up to remind us, when we discover we were not invited to so-and-so’s party, that someone else likes us even if the person in question doesn’t, to tell us that we were successful or popular in such-and-such other time in the past.

Being alone for long periods of time brings fear to loose boundaries between individuals and society. It may also loose awareness between individuals. Every human being gets much of his sense of his own reality out of what others say to him and think about him, without it they are afraid they loose the sense of their own existence.

Another kind of fear in its extreme form is the fear of psychosis, which is characterized, by a fear of loosing one’s orientation. The individual here often have an urgent need to seek out some contact with other human beings.

Social acceptance “being liked” has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay. A person is surrounded with comfortable warmth; he is merged in the group. He is absorbed as though, he were to go back into the womb. He temporarily loses his loneliness; but it is at the price of giving up his existence as an identity in his own right. And he renounces the one thing, which would get him constructively over the loneliness in the long run, namely the developing of his own resources, strength and sense of direction, and using this as a basis for meaningful relations with others. The stuffed men are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they learn together; for hollow people do not have a base to which to learn to love.


Anxiety and the Threat to the Self

Anxiety is another characteristics of man, which is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. For being hollow and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety.

No one who reads the morning newspaper needs to be persuaded that we live in an age of anxiety. Terrorist attacks; atomic destruction, etc. show how the foundations of the world are shaken.

The confusion and bewilderment in our nation show this anxiety on a broad scale. In this period of wars and threats of wars and destructions, we know what we are against, namely totalitarian encroachment on man’s freedom and dignity. We are confident enough of our military strength, but we fight defensively; turning this way and that, not very sure whether to fight on this flank or the other, whether to wait or to attack, having a difficulty of deciding how far to go. When an individual suffers anxiety continuously over a period of time, he lay his body open to psychosomatic illness. When a group suffers continuous anxiety, with no agreed-on constructive steps to take, its members sooner or later turn against each other.

Turning from the society to the individual, we see the most obvious expressions of anxiety in the prevalence of neurosis and other emotional disturbances. Anxiety, in fine, is our modern form of the great white plague – the greatest destroyer of human health and well-being.

When we look below the surface of our individual anxiety, we find that it also comes from something more profound than the threat of war and economic uncertainty. We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in. Our individual anxiety, somewhat like that of the nation is a basic confusion and bewilderment about where we are going. Shall he follow the supposed teaching of the society or should he follow the average of what is done by many. The chief difference between Middletown in the 1930’s and our present situation, according to the author, he believed that the confusion has now gone deeper to the levels of feelings and desires.

The age of confusion is a time when a whole generation is caught… between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, and no simple acquiescence.

Anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.


What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is related to fear and its definition is pictured in the succeeding example.
If you are walking across a highway and see a car speeding toward you, your heart beats faster, you focus your eyes on the distance between the car and you, and how far you have to go to get to the safe side of the road, and you hurry across. You felt fear, and it energized you to rush to safety. But if, when you start to hurry across the road, you are surprised by cars coming down the far lane from the opposite direction, you suddenly are caught in the middle of the road not knowing which way to turn. Your heart pounds faster, but now, in contrast to the experience of fear above, you feel panicky and you vision may be suddenly blurred. You have an impulse, which let us hopefully assume, you control, to run blindly in any direction. After the cars have sped by, you may be aware of a slight faintness and a feeling of hollowness in the pit of the stomach. This is anxiety.

In fear we know what threatens us, we are energized by the situation, our perceptions are sharper, and we take steps to run or in the other appropriate ways to overcome the danger.

In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling caught overwhelmed; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions become blurred or vague.

Anxiety occurs in slight or great intensity. It may be a mild tension before meeting an important person; or it may be apprehension before an examination when one’s future is at stake and one is uncertain whether one is prepared to pass the exam. Or it may be a stark terror, when beads of sweat appear on one’s forehead, in waiting to hear whether a loved one is lost in a plane wreck, or whether one’s child is drowned or gets back safely after the storm on the lake.

Anxiety may take all forms and intensities, for it is the human being’s basic reaction to a danger to his existence, or to some value he identifies with his existence. Fear is a threat to one side of the self - if a child is in fight, he may get hurt, but that hurt would not be a threat to his existence; or the university student may be somewhat scared by a mid term, but he knows the sky will not fall in if he does not pass it. But as soon as the threat becomes great enough to involve the total self, one then has the experience of anxiety. Anxiety strikes us at the very core of ourselves: it is what we feel when our existence as selves is threatened. It is the quality of experience, which makes it anxiety rather than the quantity.

The treat of death is the most common symbol for anxiety, but most of us in our civilized era do not find ourselves looking into the barrel of a gun or in other ways specifically threatened with death very often. The great bulk of our anxiety comes when some value we hold essential to our existence as selves is threatened. That is if the value of being a self-respecting wage earner were threatened, he would feel he no longer existed as self, and might as well be dead. Certain values, be the success or the love for someone or freedom to speak the truth, are believe in as the core of the person’s reason for living, and if such values are destroyed, the person feels his existence as self might as well be destroyed likewise.

“If I could not support my family, I’d as soon jump off the dock.”

“Give me liberty or give me death.”

Since the dominant values for most people in our society are being liked, accepted and approved of, much anxiety in our day comes from the threat of not being liked, being isolated, lonely or cast off.

There are two common forms of anxiety, normal and neurotic. Anxiety is proportionate to the real threat of the danger situation. Normal anxiety cannot be avoided, it should be frankly admitted to one’s self. The author is concerned with the normal anxiety of the person living in the age of transition, and the constructive ways this anxiety can be met.

But of course most anxiety is neurotic. An anxiety that is disproportionate to the real danger, which arises from an unconscious conflict within himself. The person feels threatened, but it is as though by a ghost; he does not know where the enemy is, or how to fight it or flee from it.

The main concern of the author is to convey the reader to understand how to use normal anxiety constructively. And to do that we need to make clearer one very important point, the relation between a person’s anxiety and his self awareness. Anxiety in lesser or greater degree tends to destroy our consciousness of ourselves. This is what anxiety does to the human being: it disorient him, wiping out temporarily his clear knowledge of what and who he is, and blurring his view of reality around him.


Concluding Remark of the Author of this section:

Our task, then, is to strengthen our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves, which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us.

Answer 2

I'm not a doctor, but sounds like lack of oxygen. Most air conditioned rooms in a building have no live potted plants. Plants are natural oxygen generators and they remove carbon dioxide as well as the harmful gasses (formaldehyde or radon) from presswood furniture and glue from the carpets and wall paper, etc.

NASA did a "Clean Air Plant Study" and put live potted plants into a sealed container and introduced formaldehyde gas. Within hours the plant absorbed that gas and turned it into oxygen. The top ten plants can be found on their website.

Answer 3

Best advice. See a doctor. Just in case.

Answer 4

seek help from a phyciatrist.