Difficulties are part of life, and ...

If you think they're strangers or they can't be... then they won't let you be... because they control your life. It is difficult to get out of this loop, and no one is diagnosed with anxiety because he woke up nervous on a Monday morning. Anxiety has an internal logic, and when we understand it, we begin to truly recognize it. Everything starts from a triangle where we see the future, and we see it black. And not as a possibility, but as an absolute certainty that something bad is going to happen.

That future scares us, a fear that many times we don't even know what it's specifically about, but it's there, installed. And then the brain goes into protection mode, and it doesn't stop anymore, it doesn't stop, it's like a thousand thoughts, one after another, looking for how to cover themselves from something that hasn't happened yet. It's that our brain simply can't find the switch to turn off, with an absolute certainty that something bad is going to happen.

That's exactly what makes us not rest when we are anxious. It manifests itself in everyday life, because anxiety never stays still in the head. It gets into social relationships, we start to withdraw, to avoid going out, to get away from people without really understanding why?.

At work, concentration becomes fragmented, decision-making becomes uphill, and performance drops. In sexuality and pleasure, anxiety turns off enjoyment, because it is very difficult to be present in something pleasant when the brain lives in permanent alert. And irrational fears of closed spaces, contact, people, getting sick appear. Fears that we ourselves know have no logic, but that we still fail to deactivate.

When the body also enters into a crisis, there is a point where anxiety ceases to be only mental and becomes something physical and unexpected like a panic attack, the same one that can arrive at dawn, without any warning. Sweating, palpitations, trembling, dizziness, choking sensation. That overwhelming certainty that something very serious is happening, even if there is absolutely nothing outside to explain it.

What worries us today is a matter of the future, not of the present, and almost always the excess of the future turns us upside down.

When does thinking about a thousand scenarios bring us calm? This does not deny that it is time to prepare for life, but to think about it is not to prepare, it is to suffer for what has not yet arrived.

Sometimes, the concern for what is to come far from helping us solve the challenges we have takes us away from becoming aware of our present, and when we realize life happened in front of your eyes.

And the hardest thing about panic attacks is not the episode itself. It's the fear of them coming back. Because that fear generates more anxiety, which generates more attacks, and thus creates a circle that feeds on itself and that, without intervention, tends to get stronger and stronger over time.

Janitze 🦋