Your heart pounds and you think, “This is it, I’m going to die.” You think of going to the Emergency Room, but you’re not sure. You clutch your chest. Your heart is going fast—too fast. You can’t breathe.
Eventually, things got back to normal, but that was a panic attack, you later realize. It hit you like a truck.
But what did you have to panic about? You have a nice life. Today’s just an ordinary day. You ask yourself, “Am I aging?” Am I going crazy?”
At this point, what you do varies. But most people nowadays ask an AI for medical advice, mental health advice. No judgment there, you’re just trying to figure out what went wrong, maybe if your logical brain gets it, the panic attack won’t happen ever again.
It feels terrible. Like you lost control, and this unexplainable thing’s got you at its mercy. It seems.
We all want control. We want to predict the inconstancy of our neural impulses, our moods. But when a panic attack hits you out of nowhere, we know we’re not behind the wheel, not 100% all the time.
Now you panic about having a panic attack.
How to break out of this treacherous cycle?
As a therapist, I hear some version of this story every day. But I don’t just hear it from my clients.
I had a panic attack yesterday, out of nowhere. It hit me like a truck too. Just another episode in the daily variety show called Melany’s Perimenopause. Ugh.
How do I cope? As a mental health professional and a fellow sufferer, this is what works for me:
First things first: breath control. A panic attack manifests in the body. If you have some sort of obsession with your health, body changes are the first things you notice. For many, there’s shortness of breath and the heart goes lub-a-dub-a-dub too fast. I use a yogic breathing technique and/or box breathing. Control the breath and then your heart rate will slow down. (Make sure you do your due diligence here, okay? Get yourself checked if you do have a heart condition or suspect that you have one.)
After the breathing has sort of normalized, I do some yoga stretches or some very gentle walking. The point is to tame the body by introducing some sort of rhythm. The body is wise and the body keeps the score—it is a strange animal. So, if it (and by extension, you) is panicking, it has a valid, primal (non-rational) reason. Don’t deny it. Appease it by addressing it at its level: bodily. Breathe, stretch, move the fear out of the body. Metabolize it.
Second: now that your body has calmed down a bit, try to think about what happened six hours, three hours, and one hour before the panic attack. Make a list, then leave it! Do not ruminate and ask ChatGPT if you’re right. I left my list in my journal and then I read a book. You do the same: write your list and then go watch videos unrelated to your panic attack. Get lost in a tale. Just be assured that you’ve written your list and it will be there when your being, your psyche, is ready with the answer.
The most recent panic attack I described was at night, two hours before my regular bedtime. But whatever time the panic attack happened to you, you need to put distance between it and yourself. You are not a Large Language Model (an AI). You do not think super fast. Your psyche, your internal processes, are slow. That’s why you got the panic attack in the first place—your cognitive mind must have caught something, or your body detected it, or deeper still, it was the working of your unconscious. The panic attack may even be the exotic fruit of all three ongoing processes. But you need time for the answer to come forward.
You’re no ChatGPT because your inputs are not just data typed from a keyboard. You are analog, flesh, bone, and blood, with lots of squishy, fuzzy feelings thrown in there too.
Third: Sleep on it. Whatever it was that caused the panic attack usually abides by the saying “some things look better in the morning”.
Third: sleep on it. Whatever caused the panic attack usually abides by the saying, “Some things look better in the morning.”
I am okay now. The panic attack did subside. I’ve also figured out what was bothering me. Panic attacks are not one-size-fits-all, but they always send an important message. For me, it was about my old trigger: low self-worth and its evil twin, self-doubt. I found the smoking gun, and it was an assignment in statistics (urgh) that I need to face today. But I did not ruminate more than I should. Not anymore. I let the answer come to me the morning after and, yeah, looking at it now, what got me all panicky is solveable. This is what I meant when I said some things do look better in the morning.
Will you have another panic attack or its twin cousin, heart palpitations, today? I ask myself and I ask you too. Who knows? But I will live my life as normal and assume things will be alright. Because most of the time, they are. To assume otherwise is to stare into a pothole, wishing to avoid it, but haha, thanks to obsessing over the what-ifs, you ram straight into it.
As they advise in cycling, I’d rather look at the path, not the potholes, the pedestrians, the random chicken crossing the street, or the trees that I might potentially hit while on my way in this grand adventure called life.
It’s quite a joyous ride!
(And yes, perimenopause is part of that journey. It’s like one giant obstacle that has an end too. I hope, for my sake, that it comes sometime soon.)
I’ve written this to share with you my offhand advice about panic attacks, what I do to quell the physical symptoms as well as some of the emotional ones. I gave you my secret formula. I hope I was able to help you. Now go on, face the day.
