Ep.69 Why I Used to Wake Up in a Full Panic Every Morning

1There is the victim of anxiety, and there is working with it

For years I was the victim of my anxiety. This thing had a hold of me. I was its prisoner. I woke up every single day at the mercy of it.

I remember my husband worked seven to seven shifts at the ER, and we lived far from the hospital, so he was up at five in the morning. If he woke me to say goodbye, just knowing he was leaving and would not be around to help me sent adrenaline flooding through my veins. I finally had to tell him, I love you, but please do not wake me up when you leave, because it is one more trigger.

That is what being the victim looks like. Anxiety is happening to you in real time, you feel like you have no control, and you start predicting your whole life around the next wave.

But there is another relationship available. Working with it. In that one, anxiety is happening for you. It is data. It is feedback about what you have not been listening to.

Same experience in your body. The difference is whether you meet it as a prisoner or as someone finally getting the message.

And the shift from one to the other always starts with a choice.

2Why you wake up with anxiety before anything has even happened

Here is what almost no one names. The bracing is not separate from the anxiety. The bracing is the anxiety.

When you wake up scanning, when you check your pulse, when you spend the whole day predicting the next attack, you are living in a low hum of dread that never switches off. There is even a clinical name for this, and what the research shows is striking. The fear of the next panic attack is itself a state of body tension that helps set up the next one. The waiting does not protect you. It primes you.

This is also why so many of us wake up with anxiety before the day has even started. I know that morning dread intimately. The palpitations, the shallow breathing, the inability to sit still, all of it became my baseline before I ever opened my eyes. I was so busy bracing for the next one that I never got to just be.

You cannot brace your way out of anxiety, because the bracing is the fuel.

So the work is not to guard harder against the next wave. It is to put the shield down and get curious about what your body is already telling you.

3Your body speaks first, your mind just tells the story

This is the thing that started giving me peace. I always thought my thoughts were creating my panic attacks. And thoughts are a piece of it, I will not discount that. But in reality, the body signals first.

The mind does not create the anxiety. It reacts to what the body is already feeling. Let me say that again, because it changed everything for me. The mind does not create anxiety. It reacts to what the body already feels.

This is not just my theory. There is a whole body of work on how the body reacts before the mind catches up, your nervous system picking up on danger before your conscious mind has made sense of it. I can remember being a kid in the car with my mom, feeling my whole body tense up when she braked late, before I ever had a conscious worried thought. My youngest daughter is the same. Anytime she is anxious, her stomach hurts and she has to run to the bathroom. The body speaks, and then the story comes.

The tight chest, the pit in your stomach, the sudden need to leave the room. That comes first. The "what is wrong with me" comes second. And most of us are trying to manage the second thing while ignoring the first.

The sooner you catch it in your body, the sooner you can stop the spiral, because you are finally addressing what actually came first.

4The feeling and thinking loop that builds a panic attack

Let me show you how this actually spirals, because once you see the loop, you can catch it.

I would feel a palpitation in my chest. That triggered the thought, "why am I having a palpitation, something is wrong." That thought sent adrenaline through me, so my heart started racing. I would put my fingers to my neck and check my pulse, and sure enough it was faster, which triggered the next thought, "am I having a heart attack." Then my hands would go sweaty and clammy, which became more evidence something was wrong, and my breathing would dysregulate, and it just kept building.

That is the loop. A feeling creates a thought. That thought creates a bigger feeling. That feeling creates a scarier thought. Around and around until you are in full panic, convinced your body is betraying you.

The loop is not proof that something is wrong with you. It is just a feeling and a thought feeding each other faster than you can catch them.

And the place you break it is not the thought. It is the very first body signal, the one underneath all of it.

5Dysregulation has become your normal, and you cannot even feel it anymore

Our body keeps the score. There is a whole book by that name, The Body Keeps the Score, and it is on my reading list for a reason.

When you have lived in a dysregulated nervous system for long enough, the dysregulation stops feeling like anything. The tension in your shoulders is just a Tuesday. The restlessness, the inability to sit still, the constant "what is my next task", that just feels like who you are.

But it is not who you are. It is what chronic anxiety does to a nervous system over years of go go go. And then we wonder why the diagnoses start stacking up. I got hypothyroidism. I got PCOS. Because my body was in fight or flight all the time, and I still thought I was just the victim of it.

It is really hard to hear the whispers your body is sending when noise and tension are all you have ever known.

When dysregulation feels normal, peace can feel foreign, and that is exactly why you have to go looking for it on purpose.

6Stillness feels terrifying because that is where the truth lives

A lot of people tell me they cannot meditate, they cannot clear their thoughts. Here is the reframe. Meditation is not about being a Buddhist monk with an empty mind. It is about witnessing the thoughts that come and getting curious about them.

And hypnosis, which is the foundation of my work, is even better for this, because you get to sit back and let me hold the flashlight and guide you to what needs to change. You do not have to do the heavy lifting.

But here is the honest part. When you slow down, the body finally starts talking, and sometimes that is terrifying as hell. We avoid stillness because we have been running from something, and sometimes we have buried it so deep we do not even know what it is.

That stillness is exactly where the information lives. It is not woo woo. It is like picking up the phone and calling your own body to ask what it actually needs.

The quiet you have been avoiding is the exact place your freedom has been waiting for you.

Step 1: Take inventory of what has become normal

Ask yourself honestly, what have I been calling normal that is actually tension? The tight shoulders, the inability to sit still, the constant need to do the next thing. Just naming it starts to break the spell.

Step 2: Scan your body before the next thought

Right now, before the next task, notice where you are holding something. Your shoulders, your chest, your gut. You do not need to fix it or judge it. Just be aware it is there.

Step 3: Ask the tension a curious question

Put your hand on the spot if it feels good, or just your attention. Then ask it, "if you could talk, what would you say? What are you trying to tell me?" You do not need the answer right away. The question itself opens the door.

Step 4: Lengthen your exhale

Take a slow breath and let the exhale be longer than the inhale. This is how you signal to your nervous system that you are safe enough to listen instead of brace.

I would love to hear. Send me a DM and tell me what your body said when you finally asked it what it was trying to tell you.