Step Outside

I experienced my first panic attack two days ago. It was not diagnosed by a professional, so who knows if I can really call it that, but it matched all the descriptions I've ever heard. A formless sense of dread or impending doom, rising from seemingly nowhere and existing everywhere in my subjective experience. I couldn't quite locate it because it was everywhere. Without a discernible beginning, it seemed to imply it would have no end. I can't be sure, but I suspect I know the cause.

I was laid off in early April and had been out of work for a little over a month by this point. It was a Saturday night and I was about to start my new job on Monday. I hadn't really thought much of it, as its pretty much the same kind of work I've been doing for over two decades and I already knew somebody there. In fact it was their keeping in contact with me and checking on my availability to work that lead me to the opportunity. I even carried some pride in the fact that somebody thought well enough of me to keep at their recruiting efforts for more than two years until I was made ready by the unfortunate termination.

But there I was, laying in bed, with not a conscious thought about the job in mind when I began to feel a sense of almost mortal danger. I tossed and turned, and readjusted over and over throughout, hoping not to disturb my wife too much, while simultaneously wanting desperately to wake her and talk for some kind of comfort. After all it was a Saturday night and neither of us had to be up early. The problem was that I couldn't place the threat, and with nothing to articulate I didn't know what comfort to solicit. So I suffered alone in my head as long as I could.

I did eventually wake my wife just to tell her that it was happening. I still had no real details to explore, just a simple declaration that this is what I'm feeling and it's keeping me up. I've told her in the past little mental tricks I use to try to get to sleep when my mind won't stop, and she kindly and calmly recommended I try one of them, a particularly nerdy one where I imagine crossover events in science fiction like what if the Enterprise entered the world of (fill in the franchise)? Thankfully it worked and I was able to drown out the dread with enough mental details and fake character dialog.

That was my first panic attack and I suspect it was rather mild considering the one that hit me the next day.

I wasn't well rested the next day, but other than a sense of fatigue, I was fine. My wife and I started our day reading at a coffee shop we'd never been to. I got in a workout on our "home gym", if you can call it that. I spent sometime studying the products and source code applicable to my new job, and I binged on a show I'd been trying to get through. As the sun began to set, the realization set in much more firmly that this day was over. For all practical purposes there was nothing left to do but wait for bed, and then the new job. The end of this lovely month of freedom giving way to a commitment to more years of my life working. Working for the money for the present and working for the money that will hopefully sustain us in retirement. So again, without warning, a sense of terror gripped me... No, not gripped. That evokes the idea, in my mind, of a hand clasped aggressively around one's upper arm, ready to tug or shake. While disturbing and violent as a means of robbing one of some control of their own being, its too small, too localized. This wasn't a mere point of contact, this felt like it was replacing the entirety of my inner world.

I felt as if I was going to be made of this panic, like there would be no room for me in it. It would require all of myself just to be felt, and worse yet, it wouldn't be exhausted in consuming me. Rather like kindling it would flare up consuming the oxygen of the environment both metaphorically and with an urge to hyperventilate, quite literally. I've spent a lifetime concealing my inner world at first, only allowing the reactions I choose to put forward out. From the vantage point of an observer, you'd have no idea anything was wrong, and in fact my wife didn't at first. Sitting across the table as it grew, I simply, calmly told her it was happening again.

I can't really overstate how grateful I am of all the talk of mindfulness and mental health that's been in the zeitgeist in recent years. I never really thought much of it, other than a curiosity in the past, but a curiosity that has had me try out meditation and read up on techniques for how to deal with anxiety. It shows up in blogs, YouTube suggestions, work meetings and insurance emails. I even recall a scene in Black Mirror where one character is walking their partner through calming techniques. Out of a sense of play more than anything else, I've taken moments to try to separate myself from emotions, good and bad, and practiced observing them as though I'm not feeling them, but watching them happen inside my subjective sphere. So that is what I aimed to do now.

It was far far more difficult than it had ever been before. The internal chatter required constancy. An almost babbling repetition to myself that I could remain an observer of the feeling. "You can look at this feeling with curiosity. What is it like? Where are it's edges? Is there anything good about it?" I had to keep telling myself things like "This is like a rainy day. The weather is happening to you. You can't avoid getting wet, but you do know it will stop and you will be dry again. You're not choosing to feel this, you didn't make it happen, and you cannot stop it, but it will end and you can simply watch it for now." There is no way that I could have taken this kind of advice and applied it had I not tried these things beforehand. I do not mean that hyperbolically, I mean it when I say that it would have been an impossibility for me at that time to have had this most terrible of novel experiences and been able to receive, understand and most importantly apply advice of any actions to take.

When I had the most tenuous of mental grips on the situation, I excused myself from my wife's presence to make use of a device called a Mendi in the hopes that it might help turn the tide. The device measures blood flow to your prefrontal cortex while on your phone's screen accompanying sounds aim to train, and in theory, strengthen your brain. I can't say for sure, but I don't believe for a moment, that the device itself could have done anything for me if this had been the first time I had used it. Each session in the past has been, an exercise in curiosity; more of a lark than a sincere attempt at mental health or a manipulation of mood.

The goal, for me, lay in the fact that I've always used it when I was calm and feeling peaceful and I've always felt calmer still at the end of a session. I'm a simple mammal as susceptible to being programmed as any other and I was banking on prior conditioning to force calmer networks of neurons to start firing. If I could get enough of them lighting up my brain, maybe whatever shitstorm of dread and panic, hijacking all that I could perceive, would have a fight on their hands. Maybe, if I could step outside both experiences and pay all my attention to the calm, the panic would fade, defeated by little more than being ignored.

On I went with my affirmations to myself, reminding my conscious mind that a trillion, trillion little reactions were happening all over my body that I had no control of. Cells dividing, chemicals being created, broken down, and moved across membranes or through veins. This unpleasantness was just another set of such microscopic happenings. This was simply neurons firing in a most undesirable way, but not a real threat, just a collection of events that I was alive enough to witness as conscious experience. So let them thrash about. I'll focus on the more placid thoughts and feelings, that while no louder than a whisper then, were just as capable of filling my inner world with a little time and luck. And so they did. Moment by moment, the anxiety abated, while the calm sprawled.

The gambit was a success, if only partially, as I felt better, but not well when I came back out. To finish the task I took a short walk with my wife, the sun nearly tucked away, and a breeze more bracing than I would expect for late May surrounding my skin with yet more sensations I could give my attention to in favor of granting the dwindling panic any more of my time. When we arrived home again, I was feeling myself again. I wasn't in an elevated sort of mood, but I was on kilter again, grateful that it had passed, proud that I hadn't let it completely relieve me of my self possession. From then on I would be armed with a memory of having been from one side to the other. That memory can now always serve as proof that it will pass, should this happen again. It won't be mere wishful thinking as I was nearly convinced it may have been in the moment.

If you've read this far, whether or not you've experienced a panic attack yourself, maybe you'll take a moment now and again to step outside your feelings, good or bad to grow that skill. In the bad times, you can lessen the pain by letting them be beside you more than of you, and in the good times, you can add gratitude to the moment, because its hard to give thanks to anything you're not paying attention to.