Suddenly prone to panic/anxiety attacks

Hello. I'm not sure if this is a panic or anxiety attack, but I've been going through a lot of health issues lately. Now I am suddenly having these episodes that start with decreased breathing. Then I start trembling. I try to calm myself down and it turns to hyperventilating and rigorous shaking. This is usually in slightly stressful situations. It happened once a year ago, but was just in some random meeting at my job. I started to become ill about 2 months ago, with possible Lyme Disease. I had been planning to leave my job in September for about a year now. A couple weeks after I became sick, it was time to let my boss know about my upcoming resignation and I started to have the attack before the meeting and all the way through. I kept telling myself it was not a big deal, nobody is noticing the shaking and I need to calm down, but it did not work. I later figured it was just a high pressure situation that set it off and it would not happen again, but it happened again 2 days later. There was a company meeting last minute and I had the same problems with breathing and shaking although the meeting had nothing to do with me. I've been meaning to talk to my doctor about this, but I had another attack while on the phone with him, and when I get in the situation, I want to get out of it as quick as possible and cut myself short...not getting across any of the things I wanted to say. I don't know if this is just all of the things going on in my life that are causing this or another symptom of my illness. I do know that I had low CO2 on my blood test, and was not panicking at the time it was taken. From what I've looked up, that means there was indication of a breathing problem, but can be caused by many things. I was just wondering if there is something I can do to calm me down and feel normal when this happens? It has happened 5 times in the last 2 weeks, so I hope it is not a pattern that will continue.

An issue that comes with anxiety is that this isn't something that you actively fight against. At least not in a traditional sense. Fighting anxiety is like fighting a thought that won't go away. The more effort you put into trying to make a specific thought process go away, the more it seems to come up. It's the opposite of the way you might deal with disease or viruses. If you have anxiety and you don't want it to come back then the only way that seems possible to beat it is to give in a little and let yourself feel the feeling, and then let it pass. The same way you might get rid of the hiccups or something like that. If the hiccups made you completely panicky and frightened that is :P. It's a really hard thing to figure out, but the truth is anxiety can't hurt you. If you can see it as simply a discomfort then it'll eventually fade away!