So you are going about your day, quite happily, and then you get triggered into a series of anxious thoughts. Annoyingly the trigger is seldom of the magnitude to warrant a panic attack, but your body is so hard wired to go down a certain thought pattern that you fall into one.
The tricky think is to bring your self back to facts. To focus on what you actually know and not what you think you know or what might happen. I suspect anxiety is worse for people like myself who are planners and problem solvers. One of my strengths is to identify issues that might happen and solve them, the problem is this can get out of control when you start scenario planning.
I wish I didn't have to go through this. I wish I could be more resilient and not have these days where I want to crawl into bed and hide. I have so many people that I care deeply for and as a result have so many people that I worry about - worry how they are, what they are feeling, if I am making them proud or upsetting them. I find it hard to shake off patterns I learnt growing up. Patterns that now only serve now to fire up my anxiety as I can not execute as easily as an adult woman with a family of her own.
When I have days like this I need to boil things down to the basics:
- I am loved
- I have a voice - I can tell people how their behaviours (well meaning or not) impact me
- I have options if any of my worse case scenarios happen
- I am stronger than I know, I have proven that in the past and I will continue to show that if rough seas arrive