From Executive Sales to Panic Attacks

Two years clean of medication, and not one anxious episode in that whole stretch. It still catches me off guard when I think about it. My doctor had sat me down and told me, plainly, to make peace with the diagnosis: antidepressants for the rest of my adult life, that was the plan for keeping my anxiety in check. What actually got me out was something else. A bit of nerve, and a lot of reasoning my way through the thing.

Before any of it started, my life looked good from the outside and felt good from the inside. Solid health, a job I liked, and I had just moved up to a Senior Executive role at my company. I was engaged to a woman I loved, and the two of us had signed for a lovely apartment. Weekends with friends, the usual office headaches that every working person carries around. Nothing out of the ordinary. For years I'd leaned on the idea that things happen for a reason, and that belief made the day-to-day friction easier to shrug off.

Then one morning on my commute, the chest started to tighten. A wave of dizziness hit me so hard I was certain I'd pass out right there in the carriage. Somehow I stayed upright. All I wanted was for the train to stop so I could lie down somewhere. A few passengers saw the state I was in and handed me water, tried to help me settle. I had no idea I'd just had my first panic attack, and because I didn't, I assumed the worst and went straight to my doctor.

He took my blood pressure, checked my pulse, and told me I was probably overloading my head with worry, which had dropped my blood pressure on the train. Rest for a day, he said. I nodded, paid him, and left. Two days later it came back, harder this time, and I was convinced something had gone badly wrong with my body. I hadn't changed anything: same diet, same routine, same life. Yet these episodes kept ambushing me, so the logical conclusion seemed to be a physical cause.

The doctor stuck to his original line, that I was simply thinking too much, and prescribed rest and antidepressants. None of it added up to me. Meanwhile the attacks spread out across my days. They came at the office, at home, in places where there was no reason for them. A fear started growing in me that the outside world was a hazard, and I quit leaving the apartment. Concentration was gone, work was impossible. Dizziness, sleepless nights, no willpower left. I stayed indoors and felt myself bottoming out. My self-worth went with it. I told my fiancée she'd be better off without me and I took leave from work to figure out what was happening to me.

The turn came on my twenty-fifth birthday. My mother gave me a pendant holding two small photos, one of my father and one of me. She said, "I love you, son. You're all I have left to live for, and you always remind me of your dad." I started crying, and somewhere in that I found a reason to keep going and to look for a way back.

The one tool I used was plain reasoning. I'd talk myself down and remind myself how slippery thoughts are. You can't easily argue with them, and they can rewrite how you see everything. I only landed on that after my MRI and CT scan came back showing my body in excellent shape. If the machine said I was fine, then my mind was the one running the show, and that meant my thinking was what needed a handle on it.

I started seeing that the countless dangers and diseases I feared were never mine to control anyway, so why keep burning hours worrying about them? I accepted, fully, that this was ordinary anxiety manufactured by my own head, and I met it head-on. I even set limits: I let myself dwell on the anxiety for eight hours a day instead of twelve. That small shift gave me real relief, and the first thing it bought back was a full night's sleep.

After that I eased back into ordinary chores. A friend suggested I try meditating, and it did more for me than I expected. My mind got quiet and steady in a way it hadn't been in months. The next hurdle was the agoraphobia I'd picked up along the way. Stepping outside for the first time in days, the panic would rush in. I was afraid of running into people because of how jittery I'd become. Every time, I'd repeat to myself that the trouble lived in my thoughts, not my body.

Each outing I pushed a little farther than the last, and it struck me that I was genuinely pulling this off. The chronic dizziness and the loss of balance started to fade. I reconnected with my fiancée and walked back into my old job.

From there the recovery picked up speed day by day. I felt less like the person I'd been and more like a better version of him. Things kept climbing, and now they sit in a better place than before any of the attacks arrived. What I hold onto is this: the more room we hand our thoughts, the more room symptoms like anxiety get to take over. Don't give up. Keep your attention on what you can build each day and on whatever it is that gets you out of bed in the morning.

The author wrote this in the first person to bring a true story to life. Original story found in "India" magazine. Anonymous Contributor.