You rehearse it in the car. The receptionist calls your name, you sit down, the GP asks what has brought you in, and the whole thing collapses into "I think I'm having panic attacks." Then a long pause. When was the last one? You cannot say. How often? Maybe weekly, maybe more, maybe there was a quiet fortnight in there. By the time you walk out, you realise you described almost none of it.
Here is what a GP tends to need from that first appointment, how to arrive with the shape of the problem already written down, and how a few weeks of logging turns a frightening blur into something concrete you can hand across the desk.
What your GP actually needs to hear
A UK GP has around ten minutes with you. In that time they are trying to work out whether this is panic disorder, a different anxiety presentation, something physical that mimics it, or two things sitting on top of each other. The clearer the picture you bring, the better that first conversation lands, and the faster any referral or next step gets moving. The NHS page on panic disorder is a reasonable primer if you want to read before you go.
The shape of your attacks
Three questions tend to come up early. When did they start. How often you get them. How long one lasts, from the first wave to the point where you feel more or less yourself again. Add whether they come out of the blue, in specific situations (driving, meetings, supermarkets, falling asleep), or both. Note any recent quiet patches too, because a GP wants to know what the pattern does over time, not just the worst week.
What an attack is like for you
Not a long list of every symptom in the book, just the ones that tend to show up for you, with a sense of how bad they feel on a one to ten scale. Keep this short in the room. The aim is to give the GP enough to recognise the pattern, not to walk yourself through every sensation again.
What you have already tried
Anything that seems to help or make it worse. Breathing you have learned, medicines you have been given or bought over the counter, any past therapy, any past diagnosis of anxiety or depression. Mention medicines you take for anything else, including the pill, inhalers and anything bought from a pharmacy or online.
The parts people forget to mention
Most of what gets left out is the context that would help the GP tell the pattern apart from other things:
- When attacks tend to happen. Time of day, day of the week, around hormonal changes if that applies, around specific events.
- What you were doing just before. Sitting still, waking up, mid-conversation, after a drink, after a long stretch at the phone.
- How sleep has been. Short nights, broken nights, long lie-ins, shift patterns.
- Caffeine and alcohol. Rough amounts and timings. Not as a confession, as data.
- Life load. Deadlines, bereavement, moving house, a new baby, a diagnosis in the family.
- Impact. What you have stopped doing or started dreading. GPs weigh impact heavily when they decide what to offer next.
What is not a routine GP appointment
Panic attacks are frightening but not dangerous in themselves. A few things, however, are not something to wait a week for:
- Chest pain that does not settle once the attack has passed, especially with pain spreading to the arm or jaw, or with breathlessness that stays.
- Fainting, not light-headedness, but actually losing consciousness.
- An attack lasting over an hour without easing at all.
- Thoughts of harming yourself.
In the UK, call 111 for urgent advice or 999 if it feels like an emergency. Elsewhere, use your local emergency number. Do not try to decide alone whether chest pain is "just" panic.
Walking into the room
Bring something written. A printed page or a document on your phone is fine. Say it early: "I've put this on paper because I knew I'd struggle to remember it in here." Most GPs are glad of this, and it buys back the minute or two you were going to lose to a blank. If someone close to you sees your attacks from the outside, a partner or a parent, consider bringing them. Their account of what you look like in an attack can be more accurate than yours, because during an attack you are busy inside it.
How AnxietyMe helps with this
AnxietyMe is a logging app for panic attacks and anxiety attacks, coming soon to iPhone and Android. It is not a medical device, it does not diagnose or treat anything, and it is not a replacement for a GP. What it does is quietly build up the record you wish you had the first time you tried to describe this out loud.
The Full Report, in your own data
The Full Report screen builds a PDF from a time range you choose, for example the last three months. It pulls together frequency over time, severity, what you logged with each attack, the patterns the app has found in your data, what worked when you tried something, the medicines and reliefs you used, and a log of each attack. It is meant to be brought to a GP, therapist or psychiatrist. Nothing is sent to a clinician automatically; you choose when and whether to share it.
Logging an attack
Attacks are logged by hand. The Home screen has a one-tap Quick log strip (Attack, Trigger, Early sign, Medicine, Relief) that stamps an attack with the current time. For a fuller entry, the Log tab has a guided Log Attack flow with up to fourteen steps: timing (a stopwatch or start and end times), a free-text "Paint the picture" that pre-fills the log, symptoms, severity (one to ten), early signs, triggers, medicines, reliefs, where you were, activities, what lingered after, missed activities, notes and a review. Every step can be skipped. Logging an attack is always free.
What is picked up without you doing anything
Alongside what you log, the app can collect context in the background if you give it permission: weather from your phone's location, phone use (screen time, late-night use, unlocks), a loudness level around you (a level only, nothing is recorded or stored), and wearable or health data when you connect one. Connections include Health Connect on Android, Apple Health on iPhone, and WHOOP, Oura, Polar and Garmin. A wearable is not required, and every one of these can be declined. For each metric the app has an automatic trigger threshold, for example Missed sleep or Caffeine high; when a day crosses it, the trigger is flagged for you and feeds into the day's load.
Load and the 7-day outlook, for the "what was going on" question
Home shows a Load today number with a zone of Low, Mild or High, built from your recent triggers and early signs, with recent ones counting more. Below it a 7-day outlook shows the expected load for the days ahead. These are estimates from your own data, not a prediction with any certainty, and they are useful in the GP room mostly as a way of saying "this is roughly what my background looks like at the moment." If you prefer not to see the gauge at all, it can be hidden under Customize home.
What it is not
AnxietyMe will not tell you to avoid caffeine, cut out alcohol or stop looking at your phone. Patterns in the app are things to notice and, if you want, test for a week, with your decision at the end. It also does not quietly nudge you: load alerts, trigger alerts, new-insight notes and reminders are all off by default and stay that way until you switch one on in Settings.
None of this replaces the ten minutes with your GP. It just means you walk in with the shape of the problem already on paper, and walk out having actually said the thing you came to say.