Brawn to Brain
And finally, why I believe in you The problem with experiencing a panic attack, even just once, is that it teaches you what it feels like to lose complete control of yourself. Not everyone interprets this the same way, but for many, the experience manifests as a personal weakness. You learn that you’re the type of person who doesn’t always have full control; especially when it matters most - during survival or high-stress situations. This self-model can embed so deeply into your identity, narratives such as “I can’t, I couldn’t possibly, I could never...” become second nature. You start to compensate for your lack of control by trying to take control of all the daily scenarios that might trigger you. And because that’s impossible, you develop a strained link between anxiety, fight-flight-freeze and control. Now you’re a person who develops anxiety when life gets stressful - when things feel out of control, and this can snowball, as it did for me. I believe that the way to end this process and shatter this idea of yourself, is to identify the physical breadcrumbs that led you into fight-flight-freeze compared to the times you felt a heightened sense of anxiety but didn’t enter fight-flight-freeze. I’ll bet, if you map them all out, those breadcrumbs look different to each other. That’s because there is a big difference between unnecessary environmental anxiety and a very necessary fight-flight-freeze response, and those breadcrumbs reveal it. For instance, the breadcrumbs that commonly lead to fight-flight-freeze include severe accidents, severe pain, threats of violence, actual assault, the sight or representation of a lot of blood or violence, the loss of a loved one both momentarily or permanently, a high dose of an artificial stimulant such as a drug, caffeine or alcohol, a sickness bug, food poisoning and other such extreme experiences. The breadcrumbs that commonly lead to environmental anxiety, while often linked back to those, tend to be less shocking and more about general stress trigger-points that vary for everyone; crowds, heat, noise, confinement, exposure, heights, deep water, work pressures, expectations from others, fatigue, hunger, nausea from over-eating, drunkenness, motion sickness and so forth.
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