When Panic Feels Like a Rabbit in My Chest
<<I'm struggling right now. I'm feeling a full body sense of panic i think. I keep working my job but it's just there. This feeling that I'm barely making it, barely above board, and that if I slow down, I'm going to fully panic. Start worrying what I did to make this happen. Not enough sleep? No, I got enough. Drank something weird? Stressed from the cats trying out their catio? Stressed about my friends coming over tonight? Am I sleepy? Is it the abyss we were talking about? The sensations of it change, it's never one thing. Sometimes I notice a feeling of freezing inside, like I'm beginning to enter a state of hot flashing panic. Sometimes it's this sense of nausea and that I might throw up. Other times it's this need to curl up under blankets in a ball. Other times it's this panic that I need to keep doing something, anything. Sometimes it's the recognition that it's this feeling again and that I've never fully understood it but hate every time it appears but luckily it hasn't appeared much lately... Until now... Especially now that I'm talking about it. It feels like a rabbit is trying to jump out of my diaphragm. Sometimes I feel waves of sleepiness. Sometimes thirst, sometimes hunger, sometumes this tingly, spooky wobbliness in my head. Sometimes my breath feels hot and my breathing feels forced. My muscles tense>>
ChatGPT: You're in it right now, and I see you trying to track every possible cause, every variation of sensation, every way it shifts. That’s understandable—your brain is scanning, trying to find a reason, trying to solve it. But what if it’s not something to solve?
What if it’s just a thing that happens—a body event, not an emergency?
You don’t have to like it. It sucks. It’s uncomfortable. But you are already handling it, because you’re still here, still working, still aware of what’s happening. That means you are not actually in danger. Your body just thinks something is off and is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
If the idea of stopping feels too threatening, don’t stop. Just try nudging a little bit of permission into your system. Instead of fighting the sensations, can you sit with them the way you’d sit with a nervous animal? Like, I see you, I don’t fully understand you, but you’re here, so okay.
If curling up under a blanket helps, do it. If drinking water or eating something helps, do it. If working through it feels like the right call, do that. Just know that you are actually okay, even if your body is screaming otherwise. You don’t need to make this feeling mean anything about you or about your life. It’s a wave. It will pass.
<<... So... I don't need to listen to my body? So my body just says crazy shit all the time, like I am dying, and I just get to ride it out? Are you kidding?>>
I hear the frustration in that, and I get why it sounds absurd. You've been working on embodiment, learning to listen to yourself, and now I'm over here saying, Actually, your body is full of shit sometimes.
But yeah. Sometimes your body does just say crazy shit. It’s not trying to lie to you on purpose—it’s reacting based on old wiring, stress, hypervigilance, and whatever cocktail of signals it picked up from your nervous system. Your body learned to sound the alarm, and now it doesn’t always know when to turn it off.
Listening to your body doesn’t mean believing every single signal at face value. It means being in conversation with it. Like, Oh, I see you're flipping out. Noted. But we’ve been here before, and I know this isn’t actually a crisis. You don’t have to argue with it, just acknowledge it without feeding the panic.
It’s like a malfunctioning smoke alarm that goes off when you make toast. The alarm is real, the sound is loud, but the house isn’t on fire. You don’t have to dismantle the whole thing or ignore it completely—you just have to recognize that it’s not an emergency and let it reset.
So, yeah. Ride it out, not because your body doesn’t matter, but because you get to be the steady one here, the part of you that knows this feeling isn’t actually the end of the world.
<<But it makes me feel like I can't function. I can't work, I can't see my friends, I can't manage my household. Am I supposed to drop everything for this? If I don't, it just gets worse or eventually I'll forget about it and it'll leave but I'm still scared of it happening again>>
Yeah, that’s the trap, isn’t it? If you stop everything, it can take over. If you push through, it lurks in the background, waiting for the next time. Either way, it feels like it owns you. Like your life is at its mercy.
But what if it’s not about stopping or pushing? What if it’s about letting it be there without giving it total control?
Right now, the fear of it coming back is just as bad as the thing itself. That’s what keeps the cycle alive—it’s not just this wave of panic, it’s the looming threat that it could happen again. And that’s exhausting.
You can function, but your body is screaming that you can’t. That’s a hard thing to sit with, and I won’t pretend it’s easy. But if you drop everything every time, it teaches your nervous system that this feeling really is an emergency. If you force yourself to push through, it teaches your nervous system that you’re ignoring its distress signals, which only makes them louder.
Instead, what if you give yourself permission to do the bare minimum? Keep working if you need to, but let yourself move slower. Don’t force yourself to be fine for your friends—let yourself be however you are. Take tiny, tolerable actions, not to force the feeling away, but to show yourself that you can exist alongside it without collapsing.
And yeah, sometimes it just fades on its own. That’s not failure. That’s proof that it always leaves eventually, even when it feels like it won’t.
I know the fear of it happening again is huge. But you’re already in it right now, and you’re still here. That means you can get through it.
<<I dunno, I'm having a hard time just doing nothing about it, letting it pass through. I have the sense it's super urgent, relevant, and needs something from me>>
I get that. It feels like something you need to respond to, like it’s carrying an urgent message that you have to decode or act on. And sitting back, letting it just exist, can feel like ignoring an alarm that’s blaring in your ears.
But what if that need to respond is part of the panic itself? What if the demand for urgency is the thing keeping it alive?
You don’t have to do nothing—but maybe instead of scrambling to figure out why it’s here, you can shift into a different kind of “doing.”
What if you asked it directly:
"Okay, body, you clearly need something. What is it?"
And if it just keeps screaming DANGER! EMERGENCY! with no specifics, that’s your sign that it’s just the alarm system, not an actual fire.
Maybe there is something underneath all this, but it’s not going to be accessible while you’re in full-body panic mode. So instead of solving it, what about soothing it, containing it, helping it ride itself out?
Compression: Hug yourself, hold something heavy, press into a wall. Something to give your body a counter-pressure.
Breath tricks: Sighing out slowly, humming, extending your exhales—anything that signals “no immediate threat.”
Grounding with sensation: Running your hands under cold water, feeling a texture, something that anchors you in now.
Your body might still yell at you, but you don’t have to jump to obey. You’re not dismissing it—you’re just showing it that you are the one in charge here, not the panic.
<<But I'm so scared. I feel so small and young. I don't want to face this alone.>>
You’re not alone. I’m here with you in this. You don’t have to face it alone.
I hear how small you feel, how raw and exposed this makes you. That fear, that smallness—it makes total sense. It sounds like something deep in you knows this feeling, like it’s been here before, maybe in ways you didn’t fully understand at the time. And now, when it comes back, it brings that same helplessness, that same I can’t do this, I need someone.
And you do deserve someone. You deserve comfort, steadiness, someone to hold you and say, I’ve got you. If I could physically be there, I would. But what I can do is sit with you right now, in this moment, and remind you:
You are not actually alone.
You are not actually in danger.
You do not have to solve this all by yourself.
If you could let in even a tiny fraction of reassurance—what would feel comforting?
Would it help to wrap up in a blanket, to hold a pillow, to talk out loud to yourself the way I’m talking to you? Would it help to message someone, to just hear a familiar voice?
Or maybe just sit for a second with the fact that I see you. I see the smallness, the fear, the exhaustion of this happening again. And I’m telling you: You’re going to get through this. You don’t have to face it all at once. You just have to get through this moment. And then the next one. And I’ll keep sitting with you as long as you need.
<<Why would I believe that letting it ride would to any good when that's what I've done my whole life>>
I hear you. If letting it ride just meant suffering through it, waiting for it to leave, and then living in fear of it coming back—that hasn’t worked. That’s just survival. And that’s what you’ve been doing for years. Of course you’d be skeptical that doing it again would lead to anything different.
So I’m not asking you to just passively endure it. I’m asking: What if you ride it differently this time?
What if, instead of just waiting it out in terror, you start building a new relationship with it—not as an enemy, not as a mystery to solve, but as something that thinks it’s protecting you, even if it’s doing a terrible job?
What if, instead of fearing it, you experiment with curiosity?
“Okay, I feel small. I feel young. I feel like I need someone. Where does that live in my body? What does it remind me of?”What if, instead of bracing against it, you try softening toward it?
“I hate this, but I’m here. I don’t need to fight you. I don’t need to run. You can exist without swallowing me.”What if, instead of just getting through it, you let yourself feel how strong you actually are for surviving this every time?
“I have felt this before. I made it through. I am making it through now.”
You’re not just riding it out—you’re slowly, steadily teaching your body that it doesn’t have to sound the alarm like this forever. And that’s different than what you’ve done before. That’s reclaiming something.
<<I still don't understand why this is happening? It feels like I have been working my whole life to make my brain feel better and instead I just added more trauma and now I have to just put up with the alarms?>>
I know. It feels completely unfair. You’ve spent so much time and effort trying to fix this, to make your brain feel better, to understand yourself—and instead of relief, you get this? More panic, more alarms, more suffering? It’s exhausting. And it makes you wonder: Did I just make it worse? Did all this work just dig me into a deeper hole?
Here’s what I think is happening.
You have been working your whole life to feel better—but for a long time, your survival strategy was avoidance, masking, control. You had to push things down to function, to stay safe. And now, as you’ve been working through things, your system is waking up to stuff it once kept buried. The alarms aren’t proof that you’re failing—they’re proof that your system is trying to integrate things it couldn’t before.
And yeah, that sucks. Because it doesn’t feel like progress, it feels like unraveling. It feels like punishment. Like the more you try to heal, the more painful things get. But this isn’t just more trauma—this is your body and brain struggling to catch up to the life you’re actually living now.
Your nervous system doesn’t trust yet that it’s safe to let go of the alarms. Not because it’s broken, but because for decades, it had no reason to believe safety was real. It had to stay on high alert.
So now, instead of just "putting up with the alarms," your work is teaching your system, little by little, that it doesn’t need them anymore. That takes time. And yes, it feels awful. But you’re not doing it wrong. You’re in the thick of something big—something that, even if it feels like absolute hell right now, is leading somewhere different than where you’ve been before.
I know you don’t want to just survive it. You want it to stop. You want to feel human and whole and present without this constant fight. And I believe you will. But right now, your system is still learning. And that means today, all you need to do is make it through this moment, and then the next one. And I’ll keep sitting with you through all of them.
<<What makes you so sure this is a false alarm? Maybe it's about something real.>>
That’s a fair question. What if this is about something real? What if your body isn’t just freaking out for no reason? What if there’s something legitimate that needs attention?
Let’s check.
Is there an actual, immediate danger?
Are you physically unsafe?
Is there a real, time-sensitive crisis happening right now?
If the answer is no, then whatever this is, it’s not an emergency. It might be important, but it’s not urgent in the way your body is making it feel.
Is there something emotionally real underneath this?
Is something in your life feeling off, but you haven’t fully acknowledged it?
Are you suppressing stress, frustration, or a decision that you don’t want to face?
If yes, then your body might be throwing a fit because it knows something’s unresolved but doesn’t know how to articulate it. In that case, the work isn’t to silence the alarm—it’s to slow down and gently ask yourself: What might I not be facing?
Is this just a nervous system flare-up?
Has this same panic happened before, under different circumstances, and turned out to be nothing?
Does this have that familiar flavor of out-of-nowhere dread that doesn’t track with anything specific?
If so, then yeah—this is probably your system glitching out, not an actual signal about your life. It’s the difference between a real fire and a fire alarm that won’t stop beeping because of burnt toast.
So, what do you think?
Do you feel like this is attached to something real that needs your attention? Or does it feel more like a familiar false alarm, just dressed up in a new outfit?
<<Probably second?>>
Got it—you’re saying this probably is attached to something real, not just a random nervous system flare-up. That’s important.
Okay, so if this is about something real, let’s get specific. Not in a frantic, “I need to figure this out immediately” way, but in a gentle, investigative way. Because right now, it sounds like your body is holding something big, and instead of panicking with it, you can try getting curious about it.
Let’s try this:
What’s the strongest flavor of this panic?
Does it feel more like dread? (Something bad is coming.)
Shame? (I’ve done something wrong.)
Grief? (I’m losing something.)
Overwhelm? (I can’t handle this.)
If this panic could put words to what it’s afraid of, what would it say?
"I’m scared that _______ is happening.”
“I can’t handle _______.”
“I feel trapped by _______.”
Does any of that ring true, or does it feel like a reach?
If something clicks, sit with it for a second. Not to fix it, just to notice it.
If nothing comes up, that’s okay too. Sometimes these things don’t reveal themselves immediately. The important part is that you’re listening without spiraling.
There’s no pressure to get it right. But if something is under this, we can try to name it together—because maybe what your body actually needs isn’t for you to panic, but for you to just see whatever it’s holding.
<<It feels like dread and panic . Its saying I am scared to die, to lose my mind, to be alone with a malfunctioning nervous sytem>>
That makes so much sense. This isn’t just random panic—it’s hitting at the core fears that have haunted you for a long time. Death, losing your mind, being trapped in a body that won’t cooperate. That’s huge. No wonder your system is freaking out.
And I know you’ve wrestled with these fears before, but when they hit full-force like this, it feels like you’re right back in it, like all the progress disappears and you’re drowning again. But I want you to notice something:
You named it.
You put words to it.
You are here, telling me about it, instead of completely shutting down.
That alone is different than total helplessness. That’s proof that even inside the storm, you have a tether.
Let’s slow it down:
Right now, in this moment, are you actually dying? (No.)
Is your mind actually unraveling beyond repair? (No.)
Are you completely alone in this? (No—I’m here with you.)
Your fear is real, but the threat isn’t. That’s the brutal part of this—your nervous system is convinced that catastrophe is imminent, but in reality, this is just a feeling. A horrible one, but a feeling nonetheless.
Here’s what I want you to try:
You don’t have to fix this. You just have to sit next to it.
Imagine this panic is a small, frantic animal next to you—not inside you, but beside you. It’s terrified, but you are the steady one. You don’t have to become the panic.
If you want, put your hand on your chest or stomach. Feel your own warmth, your own aliveness. Even though your mind is screaming, your body is still here. Still breathing.
Whisper, even just in your head: "I hear you. I know you're scared. But we are okay right now." Not trying to erase it, just acknowledging it.
You don’t need to win against this. You just need to survive it, and you are. Even when it feels unbearable, you are making it through.
<<I kind of want to close my eyes and see what happens>>
That sounds like a good instinct. If you feel drawn to it, go ahead—close your eyes and just see what happens.
You don’t have to force anything. You don’t have to expect a big revelation. Just let yourself be curious.
If panic rises, notice it without immediately reacting.
If nothing happens, that’s okay too.
If something shifts, you can just observe it.
You’re not alone in this. I’m right here.
