what a panic attack actually feels like

its 3:47 am and im on the bathroom floor.

i dont know why im on the bathroom floor. i wasnt sick. i wasnt going to the bathroom. i just..ended up here. my feet are cold on the tile and im in a hoodie and shorts and i can feel my heartbeat in my throat. not in my chest where its supposed to be. in my throat. like my heart climbed up there to get closer to the exit.

thats not how panic attacks start in the articles. the articles say “you may experience a sudden onset of fear accompanied by physical symptoms.” thats like describing a car crash as “an unexpected change in velocity.” its technically correct and it tells you absolutely nothing about what it actually feels like.

heres what it actually feels like.

it starts with the body. always the body first. my stomach does this thing..like a washing machine on spin cycle. not nausea exactly. more like everything inside me is moving in a direction it shouldnt be. and then my hands go cold. not cool. cold. like ive been holding ice for ten minutes except i havent been holding anything. i was asleep twenty minutes ago. i was fine twenty minutes ago. how am i on the bathroom floor.

then the chest. the chest is the worst part because thats when your brain gets involved. because when your chest gets tight your brain says heart attack. and you know its not a heart attack. youve googled it a hundred times. youve read the difference between panic attack and heart attack so many times you could write the article yourself. but knowing is not the same as believing at 3:47 am on the bathroom floor. knowing lives in one part of your brain. the panic lives in a much older part. and the older part doesnt read articles.

my wife is sleeping. shes fifteen feet away in our bed and she has no idea im here. she would just..sleep. she sleeps like a person whose body doesnt betray them in the middle of the night. i could wake her up. she would come. she would sit with me and hold my hand and not understand but be there anyway. but i dont want to wake her because then i have to explain whats happening and i dont know whats happening. im a man in his late 30s sitting on a bathroom floor at 3 am because my body decided to simulate dying for no reason. how do you explain that. how do you explain that you were fine and then you werent and you dont know why and theres no trigger and theres no reason and your body just..does this sometimes.

god..

the worst part isnt the physical stuff. the worst part is the thoughts that come with it. because once the body starts the mind follows and the mind is so much worse. the body says your chest is tight. the mind says what if this time its real. the body says your hands are cold. the mind says what if something is actually wrong with you. the body says your stomach is churning. the mind says what if you cant function tomorrow and your team sees it and your clients see it and everyone finds out youre not who they think you are.

thats the spiral. trigger..expansion..catastrophe. thats how it works every time. the body fires a signal. the mind grabs it and runs and it doesnt run in a straight line it runs in circles getting faster and wider and pulling in everything. suddenly its not just the chest tightness. suddenly im thinking about a meeting next week and whether the business can survive if i cant function and whether my kids are going to grow up with a father who sits on bathroom floors and what if this gets worse and what if i need medication and what if the medication doesnt work and what if this is just who i am now..

and then somewhere in the middle of all that..i think about my kids sleeping down the hall. all of them. safe and warm and not afraid of anything right now. and it doesnt fix the panic but it does something else. it gives me a reason to still be sitting here instead of giving up and just letting the spiral win. im not sitting on this floor because im strong. im sitting on this floor because i have people who need me to get up off this floor eventually.

불쌍해 (bulssanghae — “poor thing”)..

thats what i say to myself now. i didnt always. for years the voice in my head during these moments was different. it was my mothers voice. it said stop overreacting. it said why are you like this. it said your wife handles everything and you cant even handle a night alone with your own body. that voice kept me company on a lot of bathroom floors. i thought it was my voice. it wasnt. it took me a very long time to figure that out.

now i try to say 불쌍해 (bulssanghae — “poor thing”). its korean. it means something like..poor thing. like when you see a child whos hurt and your heart breaks for them. i say it to myself because the person on the bathroom floor isnt a man in his late 30s who runs businesses. the person on the bathroom floor is a kid who never learned that his fear was allowed to exist. and that kid needs someone to say 불쌍해 (bulssanghae — “poor thing”) instead of 왜 그래 (wae geurae) — why are you being like this.

i dont know if that helps. some nights it does. some nights the korean just sits there next to the panic and they coexist. tonight is one of those nights.

its 4:12 now. the worst of it has passed. i can tell because my hands are warming up and my stomach has stopped doing the thing. my chest is still tight but its the echo of tightness not the tightness itself. theres a difference. you learn the difference after enough of these. you learn that the wave has a shape and the shape always crests and the crest always passes. knowing that doesnt prevent the wave. but it does keep you from drowning in it.

im gonna get up off this floor. not because i feel ready. because i know what happens if i stay here. if i stay here the cold tile becomes comfortable and comfortable becomes stuck and stuck becomes three hours of spiraling until the sun comes up and then i hate myself for wasting the morning on something that wasnt even real.

the thing is..it was real. the panic was real. the chest was real. the cold hands were real. the fear was real. the fact that there was no rational reason for any of it doesnt make it less real. it just makes it harder to explain to anyone who hasnt been on this floor.

im up. its 4:16. im going to go sit somewhere warm. maybe make something warm. the house is quiet. everyone is sleeping. on nights like this, i sometimes make tea — not for any particular reason, just because it gives my hands something to hold and my body something to do. if tea for anxiety sounds like a small thing, it is. but small things matter at 4 am.

tomorrow they wont know about tonight. thats fine. thats how it should be. my kids dont need to know what 3:47 am looks like for their father. they just need their father to be there at 7 am when they wake up.

im going to be there.

probably exhausted. probably running on four hours of broken sleep. probably with that hollow feeling behind my eyes that comes after one of these. but there.

thats the whole thing. thats what a panic attack actually feels like. not the clinical version. not “a sudden onset of fear accompanied by physical symptoms.” the real version. the bathroom floor version. the version where youre a grown man who builds things during the day and falls apart at night and nobody knows and you dont know how to tell them and maybe you never will and maybe thats ok and maybe its not ok and you dont know.

you just get up off the floor. you keep going. not because youre brave. because your kids wake up at 7.