When our brain senses danger (real or perceived, incoming attacker or loudly honking car), the amygdala sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus, which then releases a cascade of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to prepare the rest of our body for action. It didn't look like immediately shitting your pants during a date because a car honked too loudly outside the restaurant window (true story).īut for myself and the 40 million adults who live with anxiety, it absolutely is a physical experience. It didn't look like chills and aches and nausea. Anxiety-I thought-wasn't a physical experience, apart from looking sort of like an asthma attack. But that's never been my experience, and it's probably why I spent the better part of a year thinking something was seriously wrong with me. On television and in movies, panic attacks look like one thing only: The character who's having a panic attack clutches at his chest, gasps for air, and then breathes into a paper bag to calm himself. It wasn't until I was in a therapist's office to seek treatment for my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that I realized these bouts of illness were actually just different facets of the same problem-severe anxiety. But at the time it took me nearly a year to figure out what was going on. In hindsight, it's obvious that I had some underlying issue-I wasn't just coincidentally getting a stomach bug every time I had to leave my apartment and then miraculously recovering.
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