What progress feels like

I spent most of the time between Tuesday morning and Thursday night last week having what felt like one, very long panic attack. Of course I didn’t recognize it as a panic attack until it was over. I seem to have two flavors of panic attack but neither of them have the precise textbook presentation I learned in school; a feeling of impending doom or a fear of death, frequently physical symptom similar to a heart attack, etc. What I seem to get are a sense that everything in the world in general and my life in particular is broken and nothing will ever be able to fix it, or a sense that everyone in my life either hates me or is angry with me about something. The one under discussion was the former and I spammed several friends, family members, and my therapist with texts and emails about how it wasn’t fair how badly my life sucked and now we’re going to have World War III thanks to Putin.

The thing is, at the time I did not feel irrational and, in my defense, it really has been a few pretty rough years and the nature of my reaction wasn’t completely unjustified. The problem started when my (perfectly justified) dissatisfaction with the state of the world turned into an out of control semi barreling downhill with no breaks. On some level I knew something was wrong. I knew I didn’t feel like myself, I couldn’t think clearly. It felt like my brain just wasn’t working right.

At this point I would like to pause for a moment and talk about brain anatomy. In broad terms, the human brain can be divided into three sections, the brainstem, the limbic system, and the cortex.

Generally, the brainstem tells you that you’re hungry and need food, the limbic systems tells you to go find food, and the cortex decides whether you want Thai or Mexican. Or, more importantly, tells you that you can’t go look for food right now because other things are more important.

That inhibitory function of the cortex is the key. The brainstem starts shouting about how there’s a big problem here (whatever it might be, probably a saber-tooth tiger), the limbic system agrees that this is a big problem (whatever it is and we certainly can’t rule out the tiger theory) and we’d better do something about it right fucking now. It is at this point where the cortex is supposed to step in and remind everyone that saber-tooth tigers have been extinct for a really long time now and all that happened was some jerk cut us off in traffic.

Problems start because under enough stress, either intensity or duration, the limbic system kind of stops talking to the cortex. It decides that the big problem (whatever it is) is important enough that we have to deal with it and we don’t have time for the guys at headquarters to get back to us. This effectively removes the filter between thought and action which frequently results in people doing stupid things like spamming their friends with apocalyptic text messages.

Or punching a wall.

What I’m learning is it’s impossible to think yourself out of a panic attack because the thinking part of your brain is quite literally not at the controls anymore. Of course the goal would be to not have panic attacks in the first place which is why I’m also trying very hard to learn the warning signs so I can do something to change the situation before the lunatics take over the asylum as it were. Unfortunately I am really bad at recognizing the warning signs, partly because I’ve spent the overwhelming majority of my life not just ignoring them but desperately pretending they didn’t exist at all. Since nothing my limbic system could do would get the attention of my cortex to have it fix the problem, my limbic system decided it needed to turn things up to a point where they couldn’t be ignored anymore.

The point to all this is I will almost certainly have more panic attacks in the future and people may very well see me behaving somewhat erratically. Be assured that in a matter of hours, or a couple days at most, I’ll be fine so just strap in and hang on.