Trying to understand my anxiety.

Hello, I am sorry to hear what you are going through. It is hard I know. But you can get over it and quickly too believe it or not. I am glad you are able to see someone I hope they help you get back to normal quickly. A lot of what you descibe sounds familiar, inexplicable panic and anxiety and palpitations etc.. I'll share some thoughts on the hopes that it will help you given you said you wanted to understand the problem. Consider the following, assume that the panic/fight-or-flight response is, roughly speaking, a special "mode" the body has to confront an "immediate threat" to an "important goal". That seems very reasonable, right? Even a little cool. It is a "problem solving" process. Think about that. It is not a bad thing in the slightest, it ootimizes the body for a particular class of problems. Compare it with other processes, other "modes" you have like sleeping, exercising, resting, being anxious, being relaxed, being angery, being elated, being sad, being focused, being unfocused, etc.. We have all these different "modes" that we take for granted that each have different levels of alertness and other properties. They have feelings too that encode our estimate, our belief about the nature of a situation. They each help us address different general classes of common problems. Take anxiety, it seems to help us maintain vigilance. It helps us stay awake and alert to a potential threat to a goal. It also gives you a negative feeling that helps motivate us to deal with whatever is bothering us (and to helps us avoid making the same mistake twice in the future. How we feel and how we expect to feel in the future is one important basic way we make desicions and plan by). If we have warped our perception and made the judgement that anxiety or panic are themselves bad (and by "bad" I mean specifically that we currently estimate that it is a threat to a goal) then we are activating our problem-solving modes to more efficiently address the perceived threat. Okay. Make sense so far? The missing trigger might just be the act of focusing on wanting to avoid panic and anxiety because we judge it as a problem with respect to a goal (which might be something implicit like feel happy). So how can we fix this situation? Consider that no matter what we are scared of, a mouse, an elevator, public speaking, a loud noise, a snake, heights, a fight, whatever situation that might arise in the infinite possibilities of the world, the exact same anxiety or panic response process is used by our body. We don't grow a new one for each new worry, just like we don't grow a new arm for each new thing we want to pick up. We reuse the same panic, the same sleep, the same happiness, the same listlessness. So if we can conquer any particular fear (say a mouse), we should be possible to conquer any possible fear (say a volcano) because it is the same system in both cases. So how do we conquer a fear? A simple model equation is the following: risk = probably * damage. Or more generally value = probably * reward, where reward and value can be positive or negative. (A more accurate equation is called the Bellman Equation, but the simple approximate one will do.) Value is what we ultimately should care about. That's the thing that rationally says should care about. Probably speaks more to the structure of the problem and reward is an estimate of worth with respect to a goal. If you overestimated the danger or negative reward of a mouse, it would seem and feel like a very bad thing to encounter one. If we think it is unavoidable seeing a mouse in the near future, then the probability is high too. So to make the value of something more positive we can do the following things (1) lower the estimated probability of the thing, which is often done through the exploration of possible solutions (2) change the expection of reward, which is often done by (repeatedly) experiencing the event and correcting false beliefs about the event (3) change the goal against which we are evaluating the reward, something humans are very good at is changing the rules, assumptions, objectives on the fly (4) moving the terminal point, think of a child getting tonsils taken out which might be scary but adding ice cream as the terminal state of the adventure makes the ice cream the goal and the tonsils just a step alomg the way (5) this list is not exhaustive but 1-4 are obvious actions. Examples, being near a lion is very scary but being near a caged lion is not. Public speaking is initially scary but after a awhile it usually becomes enjoyable. Heights might be scary but there are people who work on very heigh places or jump out of airplanes. Thinking that panicing is out of control is scary but thinking that it is not out of control is not (do you ever condider jsppiness or sleep to be out of contro?). Consider the truer nature of panic or anxiety. What is fundamentally true about it? It is the same generic processes used by all fears and worries we experience. The process has an entry point and an exit point (there is no way to remove them just as there is no way to remove the start and stop from happiness or sleep or or hunger). They are tied to our senses directly (if I see a car coming at me I might react automatically) and also to our attention system (if I focus on or visualize good things I feel happy, if I focus on or visualize bad things I feel sad). So as practice, here are some explicit steps you can do: if in a panic attack, mentally take a step back and observe how you really feel as objectively as possible. Its probably not nearly as bad as you think it is. Next think of something that you want and imagine it. Something that you actually want like "the feeling of relaxing after the panic is over" or something else you actaully want. Visualize it. Focus on it. Not aggressively, but just bring your minds eye and attention to it. If you picture it, you will feel a little bit better. Even if just a tiny bit. Focus on feeling as it contridicts the idea that you are stuck in a panic. Celebrate that feeling in your head, and that will make you feel a little bit better still. Repeat this positive cycle of thinking, this virtuous cycle, until you are out of the panic and then focus on the fact that you transitioned out of that mode and it wasn't as bad as you once thought it to be. Try and enter and exit panic as practice. You will quickly get to realizing that panic and anxiety are not any more negative than any other emotion is. All of them are positive helpful things. I can actually go on quite a bit more but this is already an essay. I really hope that this is helpful to you in some way. I hope your therapy goes well and you are able to conquer this quickly. Wishing you happiness.