A panic attack is going to alter your life forever. Frankly, you will never be the same person again.
For a period of time, it will feel like a downhill. But then you'll understand it, and then it's going to be an uphill.
It's going to be an uphill because the discoveries you'll make and the recovery principles that you'll apply, they don't just make anxiety and panic easier, but they are tools and philosophies that generally make life a little bit easier and more peaceful.
Remember something about panic attacks.
Someone is going to have a panic attack when subconsciously (and usually this is just happening in split seconds of time), an assessment has taken place by their psyche, or by their mind, or let's just say internally. A quick audit has taken place that says "This problem that's been handed down to me? I don't have the resources to deal with this. I'm losing this war, I'm going down.”
Such an interpretation will trigger your body and mind into a very natural and expected reaction. A survival response will be initiated and that is that panic attack.
You need an interpretation of a crisis to trigger this state. Nothing will happen until such an interpretation was made.
And in this way, if you think about it, panic attacks are actually normal, and should be both expected and respected. They result from an interpretation that there's some danger to my physical or psychological survival.
This is important to understand because even to this day, people mistake the potential for triggers as triggers, and they overlook and skip the real trigger, which is often of our own making.
This is really quite significant because it's where your ability to overcome anxiety and panic lies.
What gets commonly talked about as triggers, but are really potential for triggers are three.
One of them is symptoms and sensations.
This gets talked about a lot. People experience difficult symptoms and sensations.
But I don't think they even need to be difficult. All they have to be is differential to catch your attention.Meaning they have to be slightly different to how you ordinarily know them to be, whether consciously or not. Such as a scar that wasn't there before, a light-headedness that wasn't there before, a mole that wasn't there before, a heart beat which is pounding a little bit differently to before. It just has to be something different.
Needless to say, you may have already guessed what the second potential trigger is.
The second potential trigger is the awareness of the situation.
This does not get talked about a lot. It's not always the raw symptoms and sensations, but it's our annoying awareness of them. Our automatic awareness of things can be deemed as a huge trigger by people who don't know about this yet. Awareness itself gets deemed as a problem.
I remember a long time ago, I was driving and I just happened to look to the left. And there were these street vendors doing their thing, doing their business as usual - families selling stuff, kids bouncing around, people chatting.
And I was like, “Why are you so aware of this scene? Why is it so vividly close to you? This has absolutely nothing to do with anything so why did you pay attention to this? And now why are you so aware of this as if you’re living it?”
My vigilance made me uncomfortable and I had no control over it.
Even to this day, people are afraid of their hypervigilance, and I've already said this in a couple of places: if you want to overcome your hypervigilance, you have to start becoming okay with it. Relax into your hypervigilance.
Yes, it's true that a high-stress response of your nervous system, which is quite uncomfortable to tolerate, activates or amplifies the vigilance.
But controlling the vigilance is not always the way out. Becoming okay with it generally is.
The third potential trigger for a panic attack is the appearance of another set of automatic processes: random thoughts.
I call these "popcorn thoughts". Subliminal thoughts, often disjointed and disconnected. Their appearance is automatic. They're not really needed. No one knows why they're around. They hop and pop around on their own. They really are quite like popcorn thoughts.
So why have I called these three things as potential for triggers and not triggers?
It's because these three things in themselves and by themselves don't result in that interpretation of the crisis we spoke about earlier. It’s the interpretation of that crisis is what causes that panic attack.
And moreover, these three are automatic processes, which are largely out of control. But many people unfortunately take a lifetime to understand this.
That interpretation of a crisis actually comes from our own set of responses.
And yes, this was also largely unconscious for us in our past when such early experiences occurred.
And also because we did a normal albeit misguided thing of replicating how we know life to be up to that point, "just apply your mind and figure it out". We didn't know any better that often in emotional struggles, these problem-solving methods don’t always work.
But now know better, so it's going to be different.
But let's see what we did then, usually in split seconds of time.
You labeled differential bodily states as abnormal and as a problem.
You called your awareness as abnormal and as a problem.
You tried to scan your environment for proof of danger, but you couldn't find legitimate danger, meaning you couldn't really find anything to match the difficult symptoms and sensations, and then you took the uncertainty and inconclusiveness of the experience as a problem.
You mistook your automatic thoughts as a creation of your own and called this a problem.
You asked why is this all happening and why you can't control it. When you couldn't find the answer, you labeled that discomfort as a sign of danger and called that a problem.
If this is how we respond, whether consciously or not, can you see that you were face to face with a situation that you deemed you're incapable to solve and handle?
And of course the interpretation of the crisis came right along: "I'm in a crisis"
And sure enough, your body and mind went into that fight-flight just so you can survive this so-called crisis. And that my friend is your first panic attack.
People may be physically alive after the first panic attack, but their life has been altered from that point.
There really are no good words that can describe the experience of a panic attack.
It is critical to look back at your experience with panic in a reframed way.
What were you supposed to know and do at that time which you didn't do at that time?
You were, and now are supposed to leave automatic processes the heck alone, and not always consider them as a call-to-action to solve the situation by one means or another.
Going back to the list, here's what you needed to know -
Changes in bodily states can be sometimes be innocuous and they can mean nothing.
Awareness of things is not taboo; it's a part of being alive. It doesn't have to be a call to action. Even hypervigilance can be approached as acceptable.
We don't have to match reality with our emotions all the time. Leaving the incongruence as incongruence is okay.
Uncertainty of things does not imply danger.
Automatic thoughts are out of your control and don't always need addressal.
We can almost never know this in the beginning. Because it's just not how we're trained to go about life.
And so, it's okay if some problem-solving behaviors followed in your life for a little while: panic about panic, panic about anxiety, hospital visits, google searches, distractions, avoiding stimulus.
But eventually you've recognized now that these responses further fuel anxiety. And you know now that you have to catch the pattern of both your anxiety and your anxiety responses, and break the cycle.
Please forgive your first panic attack.
Which is really saying: just forgive yourself for that first panic attack. You knew what you knew then, and you did what you could do then.
But you've changed. You know better now.
And better still - give yourself a reframed experience in addition to a reframed perspective.
I say this often: go create the conditions to have another panic attack and then behave differently, so that the positive experience is coded in.
Many people are dumbstruck why their past panic experiences still haunt them to this day.
It's because they're relying on theory and analysis to soothe their nervous system, whereas you actually need hardcore, hard-coded experience to accomplish that.
Panic and anxiety cycles break by actually becoming okay with your symptoms, your sensations, your awareness, your automatic thoughts, as they stand even today, and instead of giving in to them, you accept them and move in the direction of recovery behaviors.
Understand that anxiety and panic experiences will almost always involve untruths.
For example, the thought that says "I can't breathe, I can't breathe". I mean that's a panicky thought, right?
Do an experiment, and actually see if you can call out its bluff, and breathe.
Breathe when your mind says "I can't breathe”, and witness the results of this experiment.
Frankly, these principles and perspectives are much beyond anxiety and panic recovery.
Because they're busting the limits placed upon you by your own mind’s incorrect estimation of your coping and of your capabilities. Can you see how useful this is going to be in your life in general, in domains far greater than anxiety?