Katsuhide Morimoto, Jun Takahashi, “Grace” - Expected Encounter, 2009
The simplest way I know how to describe a panic attack is by describing a classic scene that exists in every space movie. There's something wrong with the ship—an airlock malfunctions, an invisible figure or disease finds its way onboard, the ship’s AI control takes over. All the lights in the ship dim to a scary red hue, an alarm blares like a bloody heartbeat. Everyone starts running around in a frenzy (probably the worst thing you could do) trying to identify the source of the error.
When your mind begins to panic, it also acts this impulsively. It starts racing, commanding your body to defend itself by contorting in strange ways. Your heart rate speeds up, while your chest folds inward like steel double doors in slow motion. Your eyes flicker across your surroundings, classifying every object as friend or foe, identifying every door for escape. Breathing becomes strained, like sucking food through a straw with clenched teeth.
You ask yourself why you must be suffocated by your own body.
From Daniel Smith in n+1 in perhaps my all-time favorite piece about anxiety:
“This is how anxiety operates. I know that well by now. This is the nature of the emotion. It is a kind of solipsism machine. It is ingenious and rapacious in its ability to transform experience into self-involvement. With anxiety, even the most familiar and mundane stimuli—birdsong, an old photograph on your wall, the books on your shelves, an advertisement—can come to seem like direct indictments and private threats. The mind becomes a magnet for assaults. ‘And no Grand Inquisitor,’ Kierkegaard wrote, ‘has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.’”
I had a panic attack for the first time during junior year of college. I can’t remember why it started or what I did to silently calm myself down in the crowded auditorium, but I do remember it was during an awards ceremony. One of my best friends was receiving some award from the university, which he did often because he was an incredible student and overall person. He was one of the first people I ever communicated openly with about anxiety. Courtney would later be killed in a senseless act of gun violence a year later.
Anxiety has become a relatively less taboo term rather recently, maybe in the past five years or so if I’m being generous. I’d almost venture to say “anxious” is the shared catch-all word for anything simply Not Good. Why and how this came to be is its own, more investigative post, but this is not that post. Simply put, there are many things to be anxious about in this world today (ie: gun violence), many more ways to hear about them, and many conflicting ways to feel about them. Why the shared characterization of anxiety is still a surprising development though, is that anxiety and panic are incredibly isolating experiences.
Again, from Smith: “‘For a person who actually experiences anxiety,’ I wrote then, ‘it is hard to accept the proposition that any time period can be deemed “anxious.”’ . . . Anxiety is not the purview of epochs. It is a personal, bodily state of being. It is an experience: a coloration in the way an individual thinks, feels, and acts.’”
When panic sets in, an odd paradox emerges. Your mind, while being so maniacally focused on physically preparing you for battle, is simultaneously violently severing itself from your body. The knives think they’re turning outward, when really they’ve turned inward toward your own soul.
A common response to anxiety is distraction. Give your mind something else to focus on until all the lights return to a friendly, non-scary color. Drown everything out with your favorite hype songs, scroll mindlessly on your phone, whatever it takes. Rather than fiercely fighting your body, you essentially coax your mind into dropping any thought of it—or really the thought of anything meaningful at all—in order to numb itself.
While a reasonable reaction, distraction further severs your mind-body and mind-body-world connection. Isolated in the chambers of your own mind, it becomes difficult to even understand yourself, let alone the world around you. The less you understand your body, the less control you have of it. The less control you have of your body, the more easily it is to spiral into anxiety.
Control is at the center of my anxiety. I think it’s common, or at least not unheard of, for kids to be told growing up that in order to become mature, you must learn to control and surmount your impulses and intuitions. At first it’s simple things like don’t pick your nose, and as you get older, it evolves. In order to be successful, you must learn how to calculate your position in the world, how to strategize and analyze the million possible outcomes before making an optimal decision.
Put mind over matter.
I’ve found that, as I get older, putting mind over matter is not as simple. And when you witness your mind going haywire for the first time, it’s hard to know where to turn—to distract yourself, to consume everything you can on the topic, to rationalize and strategize your way out of the anxiety, etc.
The only possible long-term solution, I’ve determined after many years, is to give into the matter—the only way out is through as they say. Put your body at the center, rather than your mind. The more attuned you are to your body, the easier it is to be in communion with your thoughts and the world around you. This is much easier said than done. When you’re accustomed to acting entirely with your mind, giving up that control is extremely unnatural and discomforting. Listening to your body is not an intellectual exercise.
Running is the practice that has made all of this thinking the most evident to me. Although I don’t consider myself a “runner,” when I do run, I am at my most calm; not because I’m not struggling or in pain, but because my mind is only preoccupied by running, nothing else.
Usually, I’ll run to very loud and very fast music to concentrate. Right after I finish a long run, I’ll sometimes even get hit with a wave of anxiety as any repressed thoughts or emotions I had been neglecting flood back in.
I’ve started experimenting with running with no sound—to pay closest attention to my body when it's working its hardest. The first time I tried to do this, I caved halfway through. When I tried again, I wouldn’t say I reached a meditative state at any point, but I felt much more mentally at ease after the run than I often do.
I stole this practice from a friend who now runs only with no sound: “I run with ear plugs so that I can hear how my heartbeat feels more closely. I believe this intense form of somatic awareness induces a whole-body flow state which makes everything else, literally and figuratively, become ambient noise.”
From Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:
“Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”
“Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits” means doing so both physically and mentally. Running humbles you, forces you to bend to the will of your body; but running also requires a lot of mental resilience, teaching your body that it can when it’s screaming “I can’t.”
To run well and safely, your mind and body can’t fundamentally be at odds with each other. They have to work in tandem, and you also have to be willing to submit to the randomness of it all. Some days, you rip ten miles no problem, other days running four miles feels like death.
Over the years I’ve learned to manage anxiety, but more recently I have really intentionally poured effort into fundamentally improving my mind-body connection.
I’ve also attempted to cut out music from other parts of my day: commuting on the train, walking, working, etc. When you first begin to break out of your own mind, notice small feelings in your body, or pay closer attention to your environment, it’s painful. There’s discomfort, flare ups, orange hues on the ship. In its worst moments, even more anxiety.
But as you become more attuned with your inner world and its surroundings, you also begin to notice and be genuinely moved by small things you may have otherwise missed. And those moment are what, I think, it means to live life to the fullest.
I will leave you with an excerpt from a post I wrote a year ago about being moved:
“I choose to be moved by small things: things that I know about myself, things that I know will continue to happen until the end of time, things that often have nothing to do with me. [...]
I’m not at all advocating for abandoning goals entirely. They are tools that steady us, keep us going. But I also believe that the practice of being moved should have no preconditions, that it happens at the most momentous of life's occasions, as well as the most mundane; that springs of joy can be found in driest of places.
I wish to constantly move and be moved.”