I had the first panic attack of my life late one night in the fall of 2004.
It had been a nasty hurricane season in Florida, with five strikes (four hurricanes and a strong tropical storm) in six weeks. We’d been without power, air conditioning, reliable plumbing, traffic lights, general infrastructure for over a month. A storm would hit, knock everything down, it’d take a week to get the lights back on.. and within a day or two, the next storm would knock everything down again.
It was a bad time. By storm #4, it was easy to just decide that God was out to get you, that the lights would never come back on and just STAY on. You started living in a world of constant stress, bottled water and coffee grilled on the neighbor’s barbeque. You existed in a new normal.
So one night, a day or two after the lights came on following the last storm – we assumed the power wouldn’t last long, so we all ran around recharging and refilling and battening down the hatches for the next hit – you could say I freaked out.
It was very late, and I woke shivering violently. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t really walk. I crawled across my little Altamonte Springs apartment to the bathroom, pulled myself into the shower, and stayed under a hot water stream (a very rare luxury that fall) for about forty-five minutes until I calmed down and stopped shaking. I settled, went back to bed and back to sleep.
That had never happened to me before, and what blew me away was how physical it was. I always thought of anxiety/panic attacks as primarily emotional things, but this wasn’t. It was as though my body had been storing up stress until it could safely be discharged. It’s disconcerting to realize that your body can actually rebel against you in stressful situations – that was a big lesson for me in that fall of 2004.
I’d never drunk coffee until I started working at Verizon in 1999, and then I’d just pick up something at Einstein Bagels on the way to work. I’ve had at least one cup of coffee almost every morning since then. I credited that steady IV drip of caffeine for keeping me going through a lot of work and situations. Caffeine is our friend. I’m sure you know the drill. Where there is work, there is coffee.
So anyway, over the last year or so, the stress of life has been getting to me. Trying to line up new work. Getting deadlines out on time. Bills and checks matching up. Things at church. Family tensions. Animal health issues. You name it. Brick by brick, each new piece of stress just seemed to add to the load and my back was feeling the bend.
And each step of the way, mentally I opted for my go-to-strategy, the one that I’ve been falling back on for fifteen years: let’s get a pot of coffee on and MUSCLE THROUGH THIS MOFO!
Turns out, a) I’m not twenty years old anymore, and b) that tactic never really worked all that great even when I was. But at forty-one, it’s a damned lousy tactic.
The panic attacks started happening over the last couple of months. Heart racing. Can’t breathe. Feeling the walls closing in. Hearing the grinding machinery of our best clients (who must see that I’m coming apart, of course they see it, they’re too polite to say anything, but they know..) preparing to fire us. Convinced that there was something I wasn’t doing, wasn’t seeing, wasn’t staying on top of, wasn’t living up to, wasn’t wasn’t wasn’t wasn’t..
I suddenly couldn’t work. Every sentence I wrote just looked inadequate compared to the sentences I could have written but didn’t. Every transition looked hamfisted and clumsy. Every fact looked dated, wrong and amateurish. I just couldn’t put one foot in front of the other.
Kristi and I talked about it, and I had to admit that I have a problem with anxiety. She was growing increasingly frustrated because she saw that everything was fine, there was nothing serious to worry about, that it really was just me. And I couldn’t just snap out of it. And it was getting worse.
Finally this week, she suggested taking a day off and going out to the beach. We drove out to Santa Cruz, had lunch, visited our favorite bookstore, then tooled up the cost to Half Moon Bay to enjoy the Pacific coast.
And I’ve come to realize that coffee has been a big part of my problem.
When you’re already prone to stress, you know, it turns out that ramping up to 3-4 cups of coffee a day – and then following that up with Coke, Pepsi or iced tea throughout the day – doesn’t make it better. It makes it a lot worse. Jittery. Wired. And chronically unsettled. I realized that if I kept on like that, I’d probably have a heart attack before reaching 45. It had to stop.
So I’m scaling back my caffeine intake. The last several days, I’ve rolled back to one cup or less daily – this morning I only had a half cup – and maybe a Coke or iced tea later in the day if we go out for dinner. Otherwise, mainly water. And real food in the morning rather than coffee on an empty stomach. And regular sleep at decent hours.
Today’s been the third or fourth day of low caffeine, and the difference has been profound. I’m far more focused, and my chest isn’t tense, and I can actually catch full breaths again. And things don’t seem as dangerous and fragile or caving-in. And honestly, I’m feeling the pull of the coffee maker less and less. The caffeine is working its way out of my system, and I’m feeling a lot better for it.
I think I’m going to keep this up.
Moral of the story? Stress is a funny thing. And more physical than many of us probably give it credit for. And caffeine and other stimulants do NOT help, though they like to pretend they do. I’m starting to feel now that the best stress management strategy is preparedness, and the key to being prepared is in not being freaked out and panicky. Alert mind, calm spirit, able body.
In that sense, water is a lot more honest than coffee. And it screams at me less.