The moment everything caught up with me

This time three years ago I started having panic attacks. I’d got through ten months of gruelling active treatment for breast cancer during which so many things had gone wrong. But I’d got through all of it with my sense of humour still intact and looking forward to life starting again. Then one sunny summer morning, I was putting my make up on and realised I was having a panic attack.

Luckily I knew what was happening as I’d had them in my 20s but it was still deeply unpleasant. I couldn’t believe it. Everything I’d been through and NOW I was having the panic attacks! The point when everyone thinks you are doing okay and you feel like you’re falling apart.

I now know it’s not that unusual. And on reflection after everything I had been through not actually surprising. I’d been diagnosed the week the covid restrictions were lifted and while the rest of the country had been back to normal for 12 months I’d been shielding and still very much under covid restrictions every time I set foot in an NHS hospital. I had a compromised immune system and was now being expected to be out and about mixing with people when I hadn’t experienced that since March 2020 and it was now July 2022!

Spoiler alert, my very first trip out, to a long-overdue eye test I managed to catch covid despite all the staff putting on masks and spraying everything when they saw me in my mask.

No wonder at all that after everything I’d been through my body and mind had had enough and I was having panic attacks.

I wish I’d known then what I know now about regulating my nervous system.

I saw one of the GPs at my surgery who sent me away with leaflets about losing weight and a hug. I wish I was making this up!

As I say, I really wish I’d know then what I know now about regulating my nervous system!

The woman at the Macmillan drop-in centre at the hospital was much more helpful and gave me the leaflets the GP should have given me.

In the end, what helped was a counsellor who taught me how to regulate my nervous system.

In the two years since I’ve done my diploma in therapeutic coaching and learnt so much more about nervous system regulation. At the moment I have a free five-minute video that shares one of the most effective ways I now of resetting your nervous system when you are stressed and dysregulated. It is free and available now. Just click this link to get access.