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Hi, Reader!

I didn’t plan to write about panic attacks this week. But then it happened to me, and it was such a clean example of what “nervous system regulation” and somatic listening actually means in real life, that I couldn’t not talk about it.

I took a flight to France yesterday. I was already exhausted. The cabin air was super dry. The flight was full to the brim. Crying kids, closeness with strangers, tight, hot spaces. My throat felt scratchy. My nose was dry and clogged. I couldn’t find a comfortable position, my ribcage felt locked, my spine compressed, and suddenly my body did that thing bodies do when they decide they’re not safe: switch into an all-hands on deck mode. Heart racing, short breath, sweaty palms, stone hard belly, twitching urge to move - I felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

Musings

And my thinking brain thought: "Why am I having a panic attack?! what's wrong with me, I'm not scared of planes. Why am I so...anxious, when I'm doing something I like?".. The thing is... I wasn't having an unmotivated emotional reaction. I was having a perfectly normal, physiological and coherent nervous system regulation episode in the context of an unmet physical need. Yet I felt ... silly, maybe even a little *ashamed* at my panic. Yuck.

This is what happens: we attach a story to a nervous system event. We add an unnecessary layer of guilt and shame to something that is perfectly natural. How fast your nervous system can turn a sensation into a story, and how that story then reorganizes the whole body, is an incredible feature of our brains. I feel something physical like panic therefore something must be terrible wrong (with me or the world?). ​
Sensation becomes emotion when the brain assigns a meaning that fits the moment.

Which is exactly why “regulation” isn’t about deleting sensations. It’s about interrupting the reflex to treat the first meaning as the only meaning. It means listening to yourself with the curiosity of a scientist, understanding exactly what your body is telling you, addressing the real need, so you can move on. It took me a bit of time, but that's what I ended up doing. I slept the rest of the flight.

🎁 NeuroSomatic Practice of the Week

🧠 NeuroMinute...

When you go from "ok" to "anxious" or "fine to panick", a lot of the time, what flips isn’t your body. It’s the meaning you attach to what happens in your body.

One way to say it is this: interoception (the pack of inter-related internal sensations) gives you raw data (dry throat, constrained breath, tight ribs, fluttery chest, heat, pressure)… and then your brain does what brains do: it categorizes that packet of sensations into something that makes sense in context. As my teacher Anat Baniel always said, the brain's task is to "make sense of the nonsense and extract order out of chaos".

This is very close to what Lisa Feldman Barrett argues in her constructionist / predictive account of emotion: the brain is not passively “reading out” emotion from the body; it’s actively predicting and interpreting bodily signals (interoceptive predictions), using past experience and "concepts" to give sensations meaning in the moment. Same body signals but different context? → different emotion.

Schachter & Singer’s two-factor model proposed that physiological arousal is ambiguous until it’s labeled in context — the same arousal can be experienced as different emotions depending on the interpretation available. PS: 40% of you answered "i'm hanging on by a thread/I'm off balance" to last week's poll. If this is you, you don't have to do it alone! Reach out for support.

Warmly,

Joana

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