Falling down the rabbit hole

All it takes is just one thought. One thought to start me on a path down the rabbit hole. Just one thought to turn my day from good to bad. It just takes one thought to bring back the crippling panic that has all to often ruled my life.  Most people just assume I get a lot of panic attacks and I do but there is so much more to panic disorder than just getting a panic attack. It doesn't make sense to many why I cannot just stop those pesky thoughts or why certain things that seem mundane to others can cause me to go into a panic.

For me I understand my panic disorder as constantly being worried about having an panic attack. It's almost as if I am in a constant state of panic because I'm worried that I might have a panic attack. Being in this state of panic also causes me to have  physical symptoms that include excessive crying, sweating, lack of appetite, insomnia, irritability, exhaustion and that is just the short list.

2017 was a year filled with many lessons for me and the biggest one was learning how to live with and manage my panic disorder.  For a very long time, I suffered in silence with my crippling fear and panic attacks slowly starting to avoid more and more things that caused me to be anxious or have a panic attack. This worked for awhile but slowly my world became smaller and smaller and there was even  more things I was avoiding. It became so bad that for a good portion of 2017 I sat on my couch unable to get myself to go out and hang out with friends or do the things that used to bring me joy.

Finally after far too long I decided to start seeing a therapist to figure out what was wrong with me and why I couldn't stop feeling the way I did all the time. As a teenager and young adult I had dealt with anxiety before but this time it felt different and unmanageable.  When I finally had an answer and a word for what I was going through I felt relieved that it wasn't my fault that I wasn't able to get better on my own, I needed help and it was ok.

Therapy wasn't the magical cure all that I would have liked it to be, but it has helped me to slowly learn how to live with and manage my panic disorder. I won't lie and say I don't have panic attacks anymore because I still have them fairly often, but now I don't let my fear of my panic attacks rule my daily life.