I’m sipping probiotic tea after an IBS flare that hurt my abdomen significantly enough to launch me into another panic attack.
The tunnel vision. The pre-syncope stars. The pounding heart. The muscles that just will not to the point I couldn’t even flush the toilet and struggled to pull my pants up. Struggled as in the physical exertion feels infinitely more exhausting than running my first 5k did.
It would be humiliating, the inability to flush a toilet, if I could think about what was happening in the moment, but that’s the thing: the thinking part of my brain (the prefrontal cortex) just relinquishes all its power to the lizard brain (the amygdala) when I enter panic mode. So I look back on the event with shame, even though there’s not a damn thing I can do until someone invents a time machine.
Everything I’ve read assures me that shutdown is one of the ways it’s supposed to work in the the event of actual, life-threatening danger. My brain is not broken, just overwhelmed. The “disordered” part of having an anxiety disorder (and it’s looking more and more like panic disorder too) is that my brain has deemed pretty much everything anxiety- and panic-worthy.
For years I’ve tried to sort out why I’ve had an IBS flare when one occurs and then spiraled into overthinking.
Did I eat too much fat? Did I eat too much sugar? Did the weather get the best of me? Did I get too much sun? Did taking my medicine without food trigger an episode? Am I just too fat and unhealthy? Is my body broken beyond repair? Is this my life now? Will I never have another good day?
What psychiatrist Judson Brewer writes is that the what matters more than the why. Searching for the reason why is an attempt to rewrite the past and make a better one.
But that’s not possible. So I’m spinning my wheels trying to think of what I did to myself when I should be focusing on what anxiety feels like so that my brain can reform its habit loops based on the positive and negative feedback it notices.
I am still so very much a work in progress, by the way.
This anxiety disorder didn’t happen overnight. In fact, I think it likely stems from being dismissed by doctors, pushing for answers, and then getting the brain tumor diagnosis. For a decade now, I’ve felt like if I don’t investigate the problems myself, no one will. (If you’ve been following this blog for a while that might be obvious.)
I’ve spent years starting from the place of “I’ll probably die because no one who can help gives a shit.” Talk about anxiety-inducing. “I’m an English major! I didn’t go to med school!”
That negative assumption is not true, but I haven’t convinced my lizard brain that doctors aren’t inherently shitheads.
Anyway, I am reminding myself that getting better takes time just like developing GAD did. I’m trying to be patient with myself. Trying to remember that when I have panic attacks I’m not regressing, not starting over.
It’s like pressing pause on a movie to get a snack from the kitchen. I don’t need to start the whole thing over from the beginning. So I’ll sip this tea and spend a few moments reflecting on the progress I made.
Because all is not lost. Because I can do this hard thing. Because I have help.
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