My *Almost* Anxiety Attack at the Airport

Today let’s talk about the anixiety attack I *almost* had at the airport earlier this summer. Warning I’m going to take you on this journey with me detail by detail, so if you’re already feeling a little worked up today, maybe come back to this episode later when my airport stress won’t increase your stress but can instead be simply a chaotic story you get to listen to for your education & entertainment purposes. Hit play for the full convo!

Here's the 3 takeaways:

1. When you experience the same situations differently than someone else, that doesn’t have to mean you or they are wrong for the way it is experienced
2. When we’re stuck in states of dysregulation that changes the way we view and interpret situations in our life. The next time you find yourself ranting, spiraling out about, or even simply retelling an experience can you pause to reflect on whether this story is being filtered through a lens of regulation or dysregulation? 
3. If this would have happened a few years ago, I would have had a meltdown equivalent to my toddler's and it likely would have thrown me off for days. I didn’t match his meltdown and I was mostly reset before the plane took off. This is just a testament that you can in fact increase your capacity for stress; there are tangible tools that work to help you regulate your nervous system; you can soften the parts of you or beliefs you have about being too much, not enough, needing to control, etc… that make situations in our lives feel bigger than they need to & this is the work we support clients with every day.
   
   

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Transcript

0:00  
Welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here now. Let's dive in. 

Today let's talk about the anxiety attack I almost had at the airport earlier this summer. So this is a conversation where I want to share with you a real life example from my life where I had activation anxiety show up in a big way, and how I navigated that, in hopes that you can hear this story and that maybe it provides a little bit more context understanding for how you might navigate these moments in your very real life. And the warning or preface that I want to give is I am going to take you through this story detail by detail. So if you are already feeling a little worked up today, maybe come back to this episode later, when my life or my airport stress won't increase yours, but instead you can simply come to and listen to a chaotic story For entertainment and educational purposes. 

And before I go into sharing the details of my story, I want to quickly answer a question I got recently about the difference between an anxiety and a panic attack, and the simple way that I explain the difference between these is to think about an anxiety attack as something that happens gradually, versus a panic attack that comes on really quickly, zero to 10, almost out of nowhere. And what may or may not feel helpful for you is to note that the DSM five, which is the diagnostic standards manual, technically, doesn't recognize the term anxiety attack, only panic attacks, and it categorizes panic attacks as unexpected or expected. So an unexpected panic attack occurs without obvious cause. So an example of that that a client recently shared was they were standing in line at the grocery store and they were feeling fine, and then suddenly they weren't. They were feeling shortness of breath, Dizzy, sweaty, immediately felt like I've got to get out of here. I got to get out of here right now. Then you have expected panic attacks. So these are cued by external stressors, oftentimes predictable external stressors, things like phobias, fears, certain people, certain places. When it comes to differentiating between these terms. Oftentimes my clients don't they use the term anxiety attack or panic attack pretty interchangeably, but there are other clients who found it really helpful to have this differentiation, because they very clearly experience one or the other or both. Anxiety attack again, being this gradual buildup of worry, fear to anxiety, than to what you might label panic, versus a really quick onset of panic, zero to 10. 

And how this applies to our conversation today is that it will be pretty obvious that this airport experience was a more gradual yet there, and as I shift into telling you this story, I am actually going to start with 10 days prior to give you context for the stressors that I came into this experience with. And I'm going to do this because I think sometimes we might think that our panic comes out of nowhere, but if we were to pause and step back and be like what happened in my life in the past few hours, the past few days, the past few weeks, what we can often see is that there is an accumulation of stressors that we didn't ever get to the other side of it was like one thing and then the other thing and then the other thing, we never were able to help our nervous system fully reset, back into a regulated green zone. We never reset that baseline. And so maybe because you've struggled with activation or anxiety for a long time, you have a high threshold for this. So maybe you didn't notice. You didn't notice, you didn't notice until you passed threshold, and it's like my panic came out of nowhere. But what we need to remember is that until our system has reset, our stress bucket is just getting more and more and more and more full, and we eventually will pass that threshold, we will become symptomatic, and that can look like an anxiety attack, a panic attack, and so starting with the part of today's conversation where I am going to take you detail by detail through this, you know, week and a half of my life. 

So for some more context, my family, me, my husband and my two young boys. We live in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, and my parents and two. My siblings live in Southern California where I grew up, and every summer, my family has a standing event the last weekend of July, and my husband's family has a standing trip to a remote fishing village in Canada. So for the last three ish summers, we know that we are going to California, we are coming home, we have about a 48 hour turnaround to then get in our camper van and drive 13 hours to this fishing place in Canada for them. So already going into the end of our July, beginning of our August, we just know there's going to be a lot, but we choose it because these trips feel important for us. We love this time with family. So at least up to this point, it's felt really worth it. 

Going into our trip to California, my dad calls us the night before and is like, Hey, I've got some food poisoning. I just might not be my best when you get here, we're like, ah, bummer for you. No big deal when we get there, let us know how we can help out. Well, the next morning, on our way to the airport, we find out that my mom is sick as well, and since food poisoning isn't contagious, we knew that my dad had something viral. And I suppose that we could have turned around and gone home, but we didn't. We got on the plane and we headed their way. We get there, my mom isn't feeling great. My dad isn't feeling great. And for I guess, maybe to add another layer to this, as a kid and all growing up, the family vacation that we did a lot was to go to a lake house in Arizona. It's about a four hour drive from my parents house. That's like a staple memory of my childhood. We'd go wakeboarding, and it's really fun when we're in California that I have the opportunity to share that with my kids too. So our plan was to fly to California the next day, drive to the lake house for a couple days, and then come back. So like I said, we get there. Mom's not feeling great, Dad's not feeling great. But they said, you know, we're feeling we're feeling good enough to drive to the lake house and we can just, you know, keep it low key and hang out there while you guys go to the lake and play. And all my other siblings are coming too well. 

We get there day one there, my brother gets the stomach flu. We're just like, oh no, oh no. Night Two, my 15 month old wakes up sick, and my sister gets it. Day three, we just decide, You know what, we need to race back to my parents house so that we can all just get sick and be miserable in the comfort of their home. On the way home, my husband gets sick later that night, it got me then the next day, my four year old son, then my other sister. It was awful. So needless to say, the first five days in California were not as fun or relaxing as we anticipated. The next five days were some really fun things, and also some not so fun family drama. And overall, our 10 day California trip just it turned into one of those trips where I was so happy to go, and I was also really, really happy to leave. I just wanted to get me and my little family back home and rest, recuperate and onto the next thing. 

So now where we are in this story is the day of our flight home. We are all healthy. We're in good spirits. At this point. I did a nervous system check in that morning. I was like, I feel pretty good. I don't feel anxious, overly activated. I'm just I'm excited. I'm looking forward to getting home doing a million loads of laundry, and then just getting on to our next trip. We are flying out of lax. And so for those of you who aren't familiar with lax, it is a big airport in Los Angeles, California, and traffic on a Tuesday mid morning can be pretty unpredictable. So we gave ourselves 45 minute to an hour buffer extra, which would have been great, except about 20 minutes into this drive, my husband realizes that the flight he thought left at 11am actually leaves at 10am cool. We look at the map based on our ETA, we are going to arrive at LAX 15 minutes before they close boarding. And my just my thought is like, There's no way. There's no way. So he gets on the phone with their ticketing service, asks if there's any way we can make the flight. Can somebody hold the gate? 

What you need to know about my husband is that he is an eternal optimist who is certain it'll all be fine all the time. That quality is something that I love the most about him, while it's simultaneously being the single quality that I want to strangle him the most for. So we're in the car, my system is starting to activate, which makes sense. There's. Now this additional layer of urgency where it wasn't before the ticketing agent confirms, there's no way you're gonna make this flight. Don't worry, because of the way you booked it with no extra charge, I will rebook you to a flight four hours later. Okay, that feels like the right call to me. I feel my system starting to settle. My mom is like, well, do I take you home and come back. I'm like, no, no, just get us to the airport. We'll entertain the kids. We'll let them, just like, run them up a few hours. It's no big deal. So we keep driving. We keep heading that way. And turns out the traffic Gods worked in our favor, and we made up five minutes of time and got to the airport 20 minutes before our gate was going to close. I'm still thinking our rebooked flights are the best option, but the minute we pull up, the first words out of my husband's mouth are, I think we can still make it. Let's see if they'll change our tickets back. 

And here's an extra layer to this story. My husband has TSA PreCheck, but I don't technically Amanda Clifford. Clifford being my maiden name does, but four years ago, when I finally got around to changing my name, all of a sudden, Amanda Armstrong no longer had TSA PreCheck, and because life, I just haven't gotten around to getting it again. My husband is determined, though he's treating this like it's a mission. My husband takes the four year old and heads to security. The infant on lap is on my ticket. So I head to non TSA PreCheck security line, and we just Okay, all right, let's let this play out, except when I get to security, the infant on lap isn't on my ticket anymore. When they switched us to that later flight, they did not add him. So they tell me go to the front of the line at the ticketing counter. They'll fix it. It should be quick. You can come right back here. Surprisingly, the security line at LAX is short. I'm like, okay, like, maybe we can do this. So I go and I wait near the front of the line. It's taking forever. The person who's being serviced takes like, 10 minutes. I'm like, I don't have 10 minutes. So every minute that I'm waiting, my system is getting more and more activated. My son is getting heavier and heavier. He's screaming. He's throwing his pacifier. 15 months is just the hardest, at least for me, the hardest, because you can't really communicate with them a ton, but they have these big wants and needs. They're done being helped. I walk up to the ticketing agent, and he tells me that he can't help me unless I get in the back of the line, which totally makes sense had another employee not have told me to walk directly to the counter, which I explained to him, and he, in my opinion, in a very rude and dismissive way, just refuses to help. He scolds me for doing what another agent told me to do again while I'm holding this screaming 15 year old. It's chaos. I'm really activated, but I walk to the back of the line. I need this ticket fixed. What else am I going to do? My husband calls me. He's somehow already at the gate and with the flight attendant who has told him that if I can get there quick enough, they'd love to get us on our original flight. I explained to him what happened that I got sent to the back of this long line. I need the ticket fixed. I'm not even through security, and there's just no way I'm gonna make it. I'm really flustered, but resigned to just waiting it out to the next flight. My husband, on the other hand, wasn't so easily deterred, and he has the gay agent on speakerphone who tells me to go to oversized luggage. There's no line there. I get my ticket fixed, and now I'm in security line again. My husband calls a few minutes later, I give him the update. I'm starting to feel my system just be activated and stay activated. I feel rushed. I feel like things are out of my control. A few minutes later, my husband calls me again, and he says, hey, the doors close in four minutes. Do you think you can make it again? To him, this is a game. To me, this is just awful. I reply to him, Look, I am on the verge of an anxiety attack, either I make it or I don't. But stop calling me. Stop calling me. 

And I want to pause and offer an aside here for a moment, because I think the only reason I had enough of my prefrontal cortex online to communicate to him what I needed was because of all of the work that I have done to increase my capacity for the discomfort that is activation and anxiety. And what I mean by this is, I think a lot of times in the nervous system, regulation and healing space, we talk a lot about tools and the mindset. And the thought is, well, if I feel anxiety coming, if I just have the right tool, the breath work, the vision therapy, drill, whatever, then I can feel anxiety coming, do that tool, and then I don't have to feel it anymore. And the ultimate goal of nervous system regulation work is actually to increase. Our capacity for the uncomfortable. It's not that your sensations or your emotions are too big. It's often that your container, your capacity, is too small. And what I was feeling right then when my husband called at this point, I am like four people from the front, from the security agent. I have tears welling up in my eyes. I'm shaking a little bit. I'm holding my toddler, who is still loud and wiggly, and I am just really, really uncomfortable. That level of discomfort, even a few years ago, would already have pushed me well beyond threshold. I would be sobbing, I would probably be hyperventilating, and I was barely holding it together, but I was holding it together, and it's because I've done a lot of work in increasing my capacity to be with discomfort. 

So back to the story. I hand the security agent my ID, my ticket. We get through, and luckily, I see that our gate is just on the other side of that bag scanner, and I can see the ticketing agent and my husband standing at the top of the stairs, but I'm still feeling this activation, because I'm I still feel trapped. I see that where I need to be is so close, and yet I have so little control about how to get there, because they're going to scan my bag at the pace that they scan my bag. There's people in front of me that are only going to move. Are only going to move as fast as they can, but I'm actually shocked, because it's been way more than the four minutes until the doors close, but they're at the top still looking like there's a chance. So the minute my bag gets through the scanner, my husband and the agent both shout, you're through. Hurry, hurry, hurry. So we don't even bother to put my shoes back on, I just grab them in one hand, my kid in the other, I throw my backpack on. And luckily, we've made enough of a scene that people just get out of my way. So I run up the escalator, straight to the gate, down that little ramp and onto the plane. All of this is to say we made it. 

My eternal optimist. Husband was correct. We could have made our original flight. And I just want you to visualize for a second just this frazzled mom, like on the verge of tears. Shoe still in her hand, I am boarding the plane in my socks. It was just we get to our seat, I sit down, I hand my toddler to my husband, and I look at him, and there's just tears welling in my eyes. I let out a big sigh. He looks at me, and he's like, You did it. We made it. And I just look at him, and I'm like, I need a minute. Yes, we made it, but I don't know if it was worth it. 

And as I sit here, this is the part that I think there might be some tangible takeaways for you, is what it looked like over the next hour or two to help my system reset from This experience. 

So I'm sitting in this chair and just naturally, intuitively, my body lets out a big sigh. That's that's a way that my body's releasing some stress. It's trying to shift gears. It's recognizing that the threat level has decreased and we can move towards settling. 

I shed a few tears. Also a way that our body releases and processes. 

Then being there, I focus on my breath. Ordinarily, when I'm highly activated, I try to stay in motion, so I shake it out, I walk. But the circumstance is that I'm sitting in a seat on a plane. That's not really an option. We're prepping for takeoff, as I was the very last body to board that plane. So I'm focusing on my breath, I'm looking around, I'm doing some of my vision therapy drills. 

Because the other part of this reality is that I still have a six hour flight to get through with my kids. I know that I need my system to reset. I need to show my nervous system that we're safe, that we're no longer rushing, that there's no longer more urgency, so that I have capacity for six hours on a flight with two tiny kids. So again, deep breathing, vision therapy, I close my eyes. At some point, this wonderful husband of mine, he reaches over and he starts rubbing the side of my neck. This is something that he knows activates and stimulates the vagus nerve. It's called a sternocleomastoid massage, and he knows that this is something that I do to help settle my system. So he's over here, offering a hand, helping to do that. 

In just a few minutes, I am considerably less activated, not totally reset, but more settled. And once the physical symptoms of anxiety settled, that was when I noticed more of my mental symptoms, my mind started to spiral out about how rude the agent was. I was replaying that interaction. I. Be over in my head what I should have said, how I could have reacted differently, just how awful he was by telling me to go to the back of the line, when somebody else told me to go to the front of the line, and if he just wouldn't have been that way, then this whole thing would have gone better for me, right like if you would have been different, then I wouldn't have to feel as awful as I feel right now. And replaying this in my mind, I all of a sudden felt my nervous system start to reactivate. There was more tension in my body. My heart rate sped up because your state determined your story. So this activated state had my mind problem solving, but also your story can reactivate your state, and so your brain doesn't know the difference between just replaying and re experiencing stressful situations. So once I had noticed my spiraling thoughts creating more tension and activation in my body, I simply went back through the motions of regulating again. I focused on my breath. I rubbed my neck, I did some vision work, and then once I felt that settling in my body, I had more control to redirect my mind and thoughts, and I very intentionally rewrote this story of, yeah, the interaction with that particular agent really sucked. But remember, there was also another airline employee who was holding the gate for you. There was also another employee who was rallying for you to make this flight. She stood at the top of an escalator to cheer you on, and those thoughts further settled my system. It brought in an element of human connection. It brought in a little element of humor, as I just replayed How hilarious my situation had to have looked from an outside person. 

So sitting in the seat I eventually settled. I was able to communicate to my husband that there was a part of me that was really glad that we made this flight. It would get us home sooner bedtime that night for our boys wouldn't be impacted. But it also explains that there was this other part of me that felt like it just wasn't worth it, that it would have been so much better to have just waited for the next flight, taken our time, not felt this urgency. 

And the verdict we came to was just that, hopefully we don't find ourselves in this situation again, and if we do, I hope that one of three things happen differently. Either, number one, I just put my foot down and decide we're not going to rush, we're not going to rush, we're not going to try to make our original flight. Or maybe number two, the circumstance is different, and I have TSA PreCheck and we can all stay together. Because I think a big part of what came up for me was this very deep story that if we don't make the flight, it's going to be my fault, because my husband's already at the gate. They're just waiting on me. And I think this old pattern really fueled by fire, and this is where doing that deep re patterning work can be super helpful, because I guess this is point A and B. I hope next time, what's different is either that we can just stay together the whole time so that story doesn't show up, or that I've done the deeper work to not have that story pouring gasoline on this fire. And then the third thing that could be different if we find ourselves in a similar situation in the future, is that maybe I'm just in a different place. Maybe I'm not as bothered by the rush or the unpredictability of it, because remember, in this story, my husband and I experienced this situation very differently. For him, this was more of a mission a game. There was a strategy behind it. It was something to set out and accomplish. For me, it was chaos that pushed me to the edge of my window of tolerance. 

I'd like to hope that there is a future where I don't hold so tightly to the story that I'm only safe when I'm in control of a situation. And you could make an argument here that, oh, maybe your husband has, you know, a higher threshold for stress. I don't know that that's necessarily true. I think sometimes people have different reactions to the same situations because they're experiencing them differently. So maybe, right, my husband and I in the same situation responded to this differently. Maybe it is because one of us had a higher stress threshold, either overall, or just that that day in particular, or maybe it's because there was something about this situation and the way that it played out based on my past, lived experiences, my beliefs, the parts of me that are different than him that it felt more stressful. 

So I set that context for if you find yourself in a similar situation with a friend or a partner, where you're going through something and they seem to be handling it totally fine and you don't, or maybe vice versa. I think we tend to default to a story of, I'm less than I'm broken because And what often exists here. Is either their stress bucket today just is less full. This particular situation plays on your past, lived experiences, your beliefs differently than theirs does, or maybe they do have more coping skills, different mindset tools and a higher capacity for stressful situations. And as we get close to time for today's episode, I think I'll make that the first tangible takeaway from today's episode, and that's that 

number one, oftentimes we experience the same situations differently than other people around us, and that doesn't have to mean that you or them are wrong for the way that they experience it. 

Number two is that when we are stuck in states of dysregulation, that changes the way that we view and interpret situations in our life. The next time you find yourself ranting, spiraling out about or even simply retelling an experience, my invitation for you is to pause and reflect on whether this story that you're telling yourself, the thoughts that are spiraling out in your brain, is this story being filtered through a lens of regulation or dysregulation. And if you can check into your body and it feels calm and you're rationally thinking about these things, okay, we can replay situations from a place of regulation, and you'll know that because you're looking at it through a lens of curiosity, compassion, creativity, but if you are replaying a situation spiraling out about it 10 out of 10, there's likely some dysregulation in your system as well. Can you pause for a moment address the body based sensations of activation or shut down, and that is going to help you slow down the retelling and the spiraling in your mind. Your state determines your story. If you can shift the state that your body is in, you are going to be able to process and think about the circumstances and situations of your life very differently. 

And number three is that if this would have happened a few years ago, absolutely would have had a meltdown equivalent to my toddlers, and it likely would have thrown me off for days and days and days. I didn't match my son's meltdown, and I was mostly reset from this experience before the plane took off. And this is a testament that we can, in fact, increase our capacity for stress. This is a testament that there are tangible tools that work to help your nervous system regulate and push back against stress in real time, we can soften the parts of us or the beliefs that we have around being too much, not enough, needing to control in order to be safe, those things that make situations in our life feel so much bigger than they need to. 

And my hope is that by sharing this experience with you, that maybe you just had a moment where you were like, Oh my gosh. Other people's lives are just as chaotic as mine. Life happens, pesky human things happen to all of us, and there are very real things you can do over time to equip yourself and to grow your capacity so that these unpredictable things can happen without making you feel so out of control. And this is what we support our clients with every single day in the most personalized and intimate way inside our one on one coaching program, and then in a more community based way inside the membership. 

And the last thing I'll mention today is that if you are somebody who does struggle with panic anxiety attacks, just a reminder to check out episode 48 which is titled How to stop panic attacks. And I share a lot of additional resources there. So all right, until next week, here is to hoping for you and hoping for me, maybe a little bit of a calmer week this week, and I'm sending so much hope and healing your way. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one, anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai