Panic attacks are sometimes an over active mind, I was thinking (with my over active mind) could it be possibly that we are all indeed very spiritual (without realising) On occassion we open our minds too far, Like some kind of spiritual awareness, This scares us (fear of the unknown) and this is when we start to panic? 'Kinda like thinking outside the box'

At that moment my shyness and anxiety all flooded back and I took a few steps back, and then sank to the ground; crouching, overwhelmed, covering my face. ‘What will he think? What if he already hates me? Maybe I was wrong in the first place? Maybe he didn’t like me at all.’ No matter how much I tried, I wasn’t able to produce a single positive thought to counter my panic. I wasn’t able to take a deep breath and relax. This day had been too eventful. I began to shake furiously, afraid of what was to come. ‘He hates me! He hates me!’ I thought over and over. Hot tears began to fall down my cheeks and I squeezed my eyes trying to stop them. My breathing quickened. What was I doing? I had said what I wanted, proudly, trying to be something to him but here I was: a total mess.

‘What kind of a confession ends in a panic attack? GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF!’ I thought furiously, my efforts rewarded with futility. The world started to spin, my mouth becoming numb for reasons I couldn’t understand, almost as if to prevent me from panicking aloud. As if I had the friggin’ courage.

in my experience, the words “now just calm down” almost inevitably have the opposite effect on the person you are speaking to.

The panic attacks have been a part of Zinnia’s life for almost six months. They allow no pathway back to the innocent complacency with which she once made sense of the world around her. With every new attack more of her identity crumbles. Every day the panic rubs something else out that has been achieved with application, sometimes with inspiration.

(On Panic Attacks) And once I had my first one with Maegan, they crept up about once a month. And without warning. It was worse than getting my period. In fact, I called it my exclamation point.

...at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear.

In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely, want time to appear to run forwards because the 'future' is the only place you can see an escape from this intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn't move. And if time isn't running, then all events that we think of as past or future are actually happening simultaneously. That is the really terrifying thing. And you are subsumed. You're buried, as beneath an avalanche, by the weight of simultaneous events.