Program note: Today’s edition of The Anxious Morning comes directly from a discussion I had on YouTube with Lauren Rosen and Kelley Franke about what recovery looks and feels like. You can find that video here:
“BUT HOW CAN I NOT CARE ABOUT THIS?!”
This is a question that I get asked again and again and again because I often say that I simply do not care if I panic now. Let me clarify and refine that statement. I do care. The difference between now and then - when I was at my worst - is that now I only care for a few seconds.
Claire Weekes wrote about first fear and second fear. I write and talk about reactions and changing your relationship with panic and anxiety. Functionally, this means that you will have that first flash of fear. You will get startled. You will gasp. You will experience that adrenaline dump. We can’t engineer that away. In that first moment, you will care. I care in that first moment. I probably care as much as you do.
Recovery is defined AFTER that first moment. Maybe it lasts just a few seconds. Maybe even a minute or two. It’s going to vary in my experience with lots of variables at play. But once that first flash of fear hits, what happens next? After that, I am a recovered person because I can catch my reaction and settle back into a state of surrender, acceptance and non-resistance. When I do that, my level of “care” drops off VERY quickly. If you could measure how much I care about panic during a panic attack the graph would have a huge spike right at the start then quickly drop off to damn near zero.
What about after the panic attack? People often ask me how I can not care if something so awful happens again or not? I think what gets missed - and only discovered when you get down the road to recovery - is that I don’t see it as something so awful now. I used to. It was a nightmarish disaster. I get what I’m being asked. But the answer is that since I don’t experience it that way any more, I have no reason to care that it just happened. That often sounds like a silly or flippant answer, but it is an accurate answer. The fact that my “care meter” drops to zero at a very early point in the panic attack is exactly why it stays there after the attack.
So what does this tell us? It tell us that recovery is not just “don’t care”. You WILL care. I’ve written and spoken about this. You can’t flip a switch and not care. Recovery is essentially what we call it when you care less and for shorter lengths of time. A highly anxious person cares all the time about anxiety. A recovered person still cares about anxiety but in very short bursts that are not connected to each other. The recovery process is not about erasing your concern instantly. It’s about modifying and shrinking that concern so that it winds up back in a regular, expected place in a human life.
So yeah. If you’ve ever thought that I was lying about not caring about panic, I suppose that technically you might be right about that. I do care. I just care for a very short amount of time, which means I have way more time to care about - and live - the rest of my life.
I hope this is helpful in some way. Sometimes we just have to keep reframing things and finding new words to describe them, so I’ll keep doing that as best I can.
I’ll see you on Monday when we kick off the last week of The Anxious Morning.
“I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social.” ― Woody Allen
Every Friday I’ll share one of my favorite quotes. They’ll often have direct application in recovery, but sometimes they’re just generally funny, inspiring, or thought-provoking. I hope you enjoy them
226. Do I Really Not Care About Panic Attacks?