During a panic attack, my whole body suddenly feels like it exists in a totality of nothingness, my breath quickly picks up and begins to flatter. There is now not enough carbon dioxide in my blood, too much oxygen, my pH is rising and my body is pinched by a thousand little needles. I get light headed. It’s not nice to be alone during a panic attack since there is no one around to remind you that yes, you indeed exist and no, you do not drift away. I begin typing questions into the search engine on my phone and find a breathing exercise, but I have difficulties following it. Now it feels like the end of the world is here and pure fear rushes in. It’s not so much that I don’t know that this feeling will end, but more so that I know that now that it has been awoken again, it will resurface again and again until I am no longer human. It is fear about fear itself, and all the torturous, alienating thoughts that come with it.

But you can learn to cope with a panic attack:

A grounding technique can help you to find your way back into the world where the body submits to the mind and the mind becomes bound and collected once more. It requires you to:

Look at five things around you.

I look at my lamp, I look at the flowers, I look at the mirror, I look at the water bottle, I look at the photograph.

Now listen to four distant sounds.

In London all I hear is the sound of the road and the the sound of a plane, maybe another motor humming, my room is completely still - I fail and have to stop the exercise here. I failed to complete the exercises of IV. touching (3x), V. smelling (2x) and I. tasting (1x).

I try once again to control my breathing (breath in through the nose, pause for two second, exhale slowly).

[I usually start having these panic attacks when the following accumulates: 1.) I am stressed, 2.) I went through stressful events in the preceding year and 3.) I am falling in love. I’m disap-pointed about the last one and scared that this will already mean the end of something that had only just begun. But then I comfort myself: it has been a lot lately, this is a heavy world you live in and not a great place to be in love.]

It’s better now, but my whole body still tingles a little bit. I am waiting for sleep.

In the morning, as my body realizes it has awoken, cold fog pervades my brain, the fear is back. I draw a hot bath, listen to the boiler bubble, it groans, pumping heat from far inside the ground onto my body. I want to drown my anxiety.