Where Does It Come From?

I'm in the midst of a mild panic attack, to the extent that such things can be "mild". I thought writing might help; sometimes if I can distract myself it goes away. I don't have many ways to distract myself -- for it to work, the distraction requires total focus -- so this was what I thought of. I hope it doesn't come across as complaining. I know I'm not the only person to suffer from occasional out-of-the-blue attacks. Those are the kinds I usually experience, when I think everything is fine and it blindsides me. I think the one I'm having now is related to my foot recovery, which is too slow for my liking. I have a thing about feeling trapped. I avoid crowds for that reason, but there are other ways to feel trapped. If I ever feel like I couldn't get out if I had to -- even if I don't want or need to -- it causes me great distress. That may be what's going on now, although the reality is that I could do whatever I had to. I'm not running any marathons, and I might be reliant on the scooter to escape, but I could get out.

When I'm not having a panic attack -- which fortunately is most of the time -- I muse about them. Why do I have them? Why have they gotten worse as I've gotten older? How can I be great in a crisis and be thrown into a panic as I sit in my living room watching TV? It makes no sense. I have discovered that the more I try to fight them, the worse they get. One of the guided meditations I use for anxiety release tells me to "just feel my feelings; they are feelings and nothing more." Oddly, that helps. I used to tell myself that everything was fine, that I was okay. I think the reason that didn't work well is that if that were true, I wouldn't need to be telling myself. So instead of helping, it just exacerbated my anxiety. I remember one of my early attacks, which I may have written about before. I was at my gym early one morning, part of my daily routine at the time, and suddenly I started panicking for no reason I could figure out. What made it worse was that I had my hands on the bar of the treadmill; the bar had a sensor that measured heartrate. I could see my heartrate going up fast, and that really scared me. There weren't many people in the gym, and I knew I had to get out of there, but I truly wasn't sure I could drive home.

Here's what I did, and I'm relating it in case it might be helpful to others: I said aloud everything I was doing. "I'm getting my keys; I'm walking to my car; I'm unlocking the door; I'm pressing the accelerator pedal" and so on until I got home. I made it back without incident, and I went in my back yard and walked around in circles until I felt better. I heard once that the reason things like narrating your movements work is that your brain can't focus on two things at once, so if you're fully engaged in a narrative (or singing or reading aloud, whatever), you will be distracted from the anxiety. It works -- if you do it before the attack is at it's worst. Writing this has made me feel calmer, even though I've been writing about anxiety, which is weird. Often when it hits, it sticks around on and off for the rest of the day. I'm going to do a guided meditation and if I'm still feeling at all anxious, I'm going to read Shakespeare aloud. That definitely requires full concentration.