In this reflection we examine anxiety that seems to have no source.
You were doing something ordinary. Driving to work. Making dinner. Sitting in a meeting. Nothing was wrong. And then, without warning, your heart started racing. Your chest tightened. Your hands went cold. The panic arrived like a stranger forcing their way through a door you did not know was unlocked.
This is the most disorienting part. If there was a reason, you could address it. If something bad had actually happened, the response would make sense. But the panic comes from nowhere, and that is what makes it terrifying.
Except it does not actually come from nowhere. It just comes from places you cannot see.
The nervous system runs on a different timeline than the conscious mind. It processes threats faster than thought. It responds to patterns before you have words for them. Sometimes it fires a false alarm, triggering the full emergency response when there is no emergency.
Sometimes the panic is delayed. Your body absorbs stress and absorbs stress and absorbs stress, and then it releases all at once. The moment you finally relax is the moment the wave hits. The safety signal tells your system it can finally let go, and what it lets go of is everything it has been holding.
Sometimes the panic is triggered by something invisible. A smell, a posture, a tone of voice, a quality of light. Something that links to an old memory your conscious mind has forgotten but your body still holds. You do not know why you are afraid. Your body knows. It just cannot explain.
Sometimes the panic is the body asking for attention. It has been signaling discomfort for a long time, and you have been overriding the signals. The panic is the volume turning up because the quieter messages were ignored.
The panic is not random. It is information. It is your nervous system doing what it thinks it needs to do to keep you safe. It is wrong about the danger, but it is not malfunctioning. It is just working with incomplete information.
You are not going crazy. You are not broken. Your body is responding to something. Finding out what takes time. But it is findable.
The panic is not the enemy. It is a messenger. A loud, disruptive, unwelcome messenger. But still trying to tell you something.