The phrase "a sense of suffocation" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a feeling of being overwhelmed or constrained, either physically or emotionally.
Example: "As the deadline approached, I felt a sense of suffocation, as if the pressure was closing in on me."
Alternatives: "a feeling of constriction" or "a sense of oppression."
"I feel a sense of suffocation," he said.
He said he saw intelligence reports saying that waterboarding, a technique that induces a sense of suffocation, had caused Abu Zubaydah to start talking after 35 seconds.
"Behind the emancipation of women, the drive for education and training, the economic dynamism, the emergence of a middle class, there was a despair, a suffering, a sense of suffocation.
From this state he was awakened ages later, it seemed to him by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation.
One patient described nervousness, a feeling of panic and a sense of suffocation after wearing an eye mask and earplugs and another reported feeling pain in the ear canal with the ear plugs.
Ultimately, do you feel a sense of suffocation in your relationship; or a lack of direction or overwhelming fog whenever you try to think of doing things without your partner?
But it was a growing sense of suffocation in the North Korea of Kim Jong Il, where the state determined your career, your worth and even your wife, that inspired him to risk escape.
He said, "[T]he thread that ran through their many stories was a palpable sense of suffocation, not just physical in that they were incarcerated but psychological, spiritual and social".
She no longer felt the sense of suffocation that had come over her in the métro, and a little while before at the Barbès-Rochechouart crossroads at the sight of the motionless soldiers and policemen.
The London it evokes is expansive to begin with, but gradually becomes more claustrophobic and seemingly unsafe as the characters' sense of suffocation intensifies.
