Ep. 233: When Panic Finds You in the Night

I want to start somewhere real today.

Not with a framework. Not with a tip. Not with a lesson I've already figured out and wrapped up neatly for you.

I want to start with what actually happened last week.

A few nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night gasping for air.

Not from a nightmare. Not because something was wrong in the room. Not because one of my kids called out or a door slammed or any of the normal things that pull you out of sleep.

I was having a panic attack. In my sleep.

Sharing more about this today.

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Transcript

All right, so here's where we are. We're walking through some unexpected uncertainty right now with my husband's work. And I'm gonna keep it there because that's as specific as I need to be right now. But what I will tell you is that it's the kind of uncertainty that doesn't stay in one lane. It touches more than one area of your life. It creates questions that you can't answer yet. It asks you to make decisions before you have

all of the information or barely any information at all. And it does not pause while you catch your breath. There are a lot of unknowns. A lot of things are still unresolved. And honestly, I don't have really any clarity about what's coming next. I don't know how this ends. I don't know what it's going to require. I don't know what the other side looks like yet. What I do have is responsibility. I have a business to run. I have...

a team to show up for. I have a family who needs me to be present. I have real decisions to make that affect real people. And some of those decisions still need to be made far, far down the road. And some of them need to be made right now, even though I feel completely unprepared to make them. And some of these decisions that I've already had to make, these are ones that I have never wanted to have to make.

I have never wanted to be in the position that I have been in in the past week as a result of what's going on right now in real time. And the decisions that I've had to make thus far, I will tell you in full transparency, they nearly broke me. But there's this thing called life and it doesn't stop or slow down so that you can catch your breath. Really, not even so that you can process the heavy things that you're dealing with in real time.

other than in the stolen pockets of time that aren't nearly enough. But life continues on nonetheless. And so I've been doing what I always do, pushing through, handling the next thing, staying in motion, managing what's in front of me, and trying to not let my brain get too far ahead into the territory of what might be coming. I thought I was doing okay. I really did. And then my body woke me up at 3 a.m. and said, nope.

Nope, you're not. You're not OK. And the thing is, my body was right. Here's what I've been kind of marinating on for the past few days. Well, past few days at least, I think. The hardest place to be isn't when everything has already fallen apart. It's when you're bracing yourself for the what if it does. And here's what makes this particular season of uncertainty

for me, different from the others. We have been here before. Here's the thing. We've been here before, not once, but three times. Three times in our marriage, we've walked through serious uncertainty around my husband's work or future work. Three times we've had to hold on to figure it out, to adjust everything and keep going. And we did every time we came on on the other side. And so in some ways, I know we can do this.

I know that we've survived versions of this before. That part should be reassuring. And some days it is. But there's this other side of that. The stakes are so much higher now. When you face something like this in your 30s or even your early 40s, there's this sense of, even when it doesn't feel like it in the moment, there's this sense that you have time, right?

You have time to rebuild. You have time to recover. You have time to start over if you have to. The runway feels long even when things feel urgent. 

We're in our mid 50s now, and that math is different. The runway is shorter. The decisions, they carry more weight. The margin for error, it feels smaller. And there is this very loud voice in my head that says, we should not be here again. Not at this stage. Not after everything we've done, everything we've built, everything we've sacrificed and worked for. We paid our dues. We made the responsible choices. We didn't take reckless risks.

We showed up, we did the work, we played by the rules, and yet here we are again. And that brings up something that I think is really important to name because I think a lot of you who have been in a situation, or maybe you're in a situation like this now, you know this feeling too. Even if the different, even if the circumstances are different, there is a particular kind of anger, and I'm gonna call it what it is, that comes from facing a hard season when you feel like you've already earned your way out of it.

When you look at your life and you think, I did what I was supposed to do. I was responsible. I was diligent. I built something. And I still have ended up here. And that anger is real. It is valid. And it deserves to be named. Because here's what happens when we don't name it. It turns inward. It becomes shame. Why can't I get ahead of this? It becomes self-doubt. Did we make wrong choices somewhere along the way?

It becomes this quiet, creeping fear that maybe this is just how life is going to be. That the stability that we've been working towards is always and forever just going to be out of reach. I have felt all of it. The anger, the shame, the fear, the exhaustion of being here again in a season of life where this should feel like ancient history. And I've had to be very deliberate about what I should do with those feelings because the we've paid our dues anger. It wants to paralyze you.

It wants you to sit in the unfairness of it until you can't move. It's also easy in midlife, and I don't think we say this out loud enough, to get paralyzed by the math, by the timeline, by the awareness of your age and what it means for what's still possible. You start doing the calculations, like how many more working years do we have? How long to rebuild if this goes sideways? And those are legitimate questions. They're not irrational.

But when you let your brain run those numbers on a loop at 3 AM, you're not problem solving at that point. You're spiraling. There is a difference between wise planning and a fearful, the sky is falling way of looking at things. And when you're in the middle of uncertainty in your mid-50s, having been here before, it is very easy to blur that line. And so here's what I keep coming back to.

The fact that we've been here before and survived it every single time, it's not a curse. It actually is a credential. It means we know how to do this. It means we have a track record. It means that whatever hard thing is required, the pivoting, the adjusting, the holding on, the making the best decision you can with the information you have, even though you know it's not enough, we have done it before. We are not starting from zero. We are starting from experience. And the stakes being higher,

doesn't mean that the outcome is worse. It just means that the work is more serious. It's more intentional. It's more deliberate. The mid-50s are not the end of the runway. They are not proof that you missed your window or that it's too late to land somewhere good. They're just the season that you're in. And this season, like every other season, will require something of you. And you will rise to it because you have every single time. You've done this before.

So I want to say this again, this is where I'm having to sit. It's where I'm asking myself to sit, what I'm asking myself to grasp onto. The fact that we've been here before is a credential. We're not starting from zero, we're starting from experience.

And so here's the thing that I've been learning in this very short season that we are in. By that, I mean, I'm sharing this with you in real time. I share this from a place where this is raw. This is real and this is a fully open, emotional, reality-based wound. I want to spend some real time on this because I think we just skip past it way too fast otherwise. We have to name

what we are actually feeling. Not to manage it, not to minimize it, not to perform some five step process, although if you know me, you know I certainly do have a process for working your way through emotions. But we can't process our way through this or convince ourselves that we're fine simply because we're still functioning. It is essential to actually name it. Name what you're feeling, what you're carrying, the raw.

the bleeding, the all-consuming thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Because here's what happens when we don't name them. They find another way out. For me, apparently, they find their way out at 3 a.m. while I'm asleep and have absolutely zero defenses left. So let me tell you what I've had to name in this season. Not because you need my specific list, but because I want to go first.

As someone who helps women, as someone who coaches and sits with women in their lives, in their hard, in their messy, in their unthinkable, I have to go first. Because I think sometimes we need someone to go first before we're willing to be honest with ourselves. So this is me laying it all out for you in real time. Here's what I'm feeling, fear. That's the big one, right? Just flat out fear.

Fear of what might happen, fear of what we might lose, fear of what our life might look like on the other side of this and whether it's going to be OK. Uncertainty. And I don't just mean not knowing the outcome. I mean the specific kind of discomfort that comes from not even knowing what questions to prepare for yet when you can't game plan because the board hasn't even been set yet. Another thing I'm feeling is fear of making a misstep.

This one is real and I don't think we talk about this enough because it exists in a lot of places, in a lot of lives, in a lot of different contexts. There are seasons where the margin for error feels razor thin. When you are aware that a wrong move, a wrong decision, a wrong word, a wrong call could make things significantly worse. And that awareness, it has its own kind of weight. You're not just carrying the uncertainty, you're carrying the pressure of having to navigate

everything very carefully. And underneath all of that, there's just this low hum of dread, that feeling of waiting for something that you can't see yet. And it's hard to describe, but if you've ever been in a season like this, I know you know exactly what I mean. Now here's what I wanna say about all of that. Don't zoom past it. Don't zoom past all of those fears that you discover. And I know that that's counterintuitive because

Every instinct that you have and every self-help message that you've ever consumed is probably telling you to reframe it, to focus on what you can control. I say these things too. To think positive, to choose gratitude, to keep moving. And again, I'm not saying those things don't have a place because they do. And we'll get there. But you can't shortcut the part where you actually feel what you're feeling.

You cannot toxic positivity your way out of the real, hard, scary season without your body eventually handing you the invoice. Trust me, I have had the 3 a.m. panic attack receipt. We don't like to sit as humans. We don't like to sit in uncomfortable feelings. That is human. That is normal. We are wired to move away from discomfort, to fix it or flee it or numb it or reframe it into something more manageable.

But some seasons don't give you that option. Some seasons ask you to just sit in it, to feel afraid without immediately trying to fix the fear, to feel uncertain without immediately trying to manufacture clarity, to let the uncomfortable thing be uncomfortable without judgment, without shame, without telling yourself that you should be handling this better. Naming these feelings is the first step.

Not so that you can wallow in it, not so that it becomes your whole identity, but so that it stops running the show from the background. You need it in the forefront. You need it front and center. Because what you don't name, you carry. And eventually, your body starts carrying it for you without you knowing it. So let me walk you through what this kind of season actually feels like from the inside, because I think

I think we often feel like something is wrong with us when really what we're experiencing is just what this is. Number one, your body knows what your brain won't admit. Your body knows it before your brain does a lot of times. I had convinced myself that I was managing, that I was staying functional, that I was making decisions, that I was showing up and on the surface, that was all true. I was doing all those things. But your nervous system, it doesn't care about the surface.

It doesn't care that you got through the day. It keeps a running tab of everything you're actually carrying underneath all of that. Every fear that you didn't let yourself feel, every worry that you pushed back down because there wasn't time to deal with it. Every moment that you chose to keep going instead of acknowledging that you know what, this is genuinely hard. And when you finally stop, when you run out of road, when the house gets quiet and you close your eyes,

It's going to hand you the bill of all of these things that you don't have in the forefront. That panic attack, it was not some sort of malfunction. It was actually information. So your body knows what your brain won't admit. Number two, the weight is constant and quiet. This kind of hard, it isn't dramatic. It's not the kind where you fall apart in public or can't get out of bed. It's more subtle than that.

And in some ways, that makes it harder to take seriously. It's this low-level hum that runs underneath everything, the what if that's always there in the background. It's in the background of dinner. It's in the back of your mind during a conversation. It's sitting quietly behind every normal moment of a normal day. You get good at functioning around it. You get good at showing up. And from the outside, nobody can even tell. But you know.

You feel the weight of it every day and that takes something from you even when you're doing everything right.

This hum that is never quiet in times like this. This is where I am for sure. It's this hum that there's nothing clear to act on. Because I think that one of the most disorienting things about uncertainty is that you can't fix it. You can't solve a problem that hasn't fully formed yet. You can't make a plan when you don't have enough information. And so your brain, if you're sitting in a place like this, your brain, it's doing what brains do. It tries to get ahead of it.

It runs the scenarios. It plays out the worst cases. It searches for answers that don't exist yet because finding an answer, any answer, it feels safer than sitting in the not knowing. The fact that that's happening, it's not weakness, it's just how we're wired, but it is exhausting and it keeps you stuck in a loop that has no exit because you're trying to solve something that isn't even fully here yet. This is what capacity overload actually looks like.

We usually think, I think capacity, I know capacity is kind of a buzzword right now. We usually think of it though, we think of capacity as having too much on your plate, as having too many tasks, too many commitments. But sometimes capacity overload has nothing to do with your to-do list. Sometimes it's the emotional weight of what's unresolved. It's the mental energy that it takes to hold uncertainty without spiraling. It's the effort of showing up fully to your life while carrying something.

heavy underneath all of it. That takes up space, real space. And it doesn't matter how good your systems are. Emotional weight uses capacity. It drains it quickly, whether you acknowledge it or not. And here's what makes seasons like these, including mine right now, particularly hard. Because I'm not navigating this in a vacuum. None of us are. When you're in a season of uncertainty, you're still someone's mom.

You could still be someone's wife. You still have people depending on you. You've still got a business or a job or customers to show up for. You've got commitments that don't pause just because life got complicated. I've had to make some really hard calls recently. Decisions that I didn't want to make. Decisions that required me to pull back in places that I didn't want to pull back and to disappoint people I genuinely care about. Decisions that felt like the wrong thing.

Even though I knew that they were the right thing, because the right thing in a hard season, it doesn't always feel good. And in fact, it feels wrong, because everything just feels wrong. And that's a different kind of weight that you're carrying on your shoulders. Because it's not just what you're going through. It's what you're going through while still being responsible, while still leading, while still showing up for the people and the things that depend on you. You might find yourself less available than normal, quieter, more guarded. And you feel that, because you care.

Because this version of yourself, even temporarily, it doesn't sit well with you. It's not who you want to be. But I want to say something clearly. This isn't a failure of any kind. This is what responsible leadership looks like in a hard season. There's a difference between failing and being stretched thin. There's a difference between checking out and being in a season where your capacity is just genuinely limited.

There's a difference between not caring and carrying so much that you have to be more selective about where you put your energy. You know which situation you're in.

We talk so much. When we talk about struggles and hard times and challenges and obstacles and hard seasons, we talk so much about the before and after. There's the before. The life that you had when things made sense. There was the clarity. There was the plan. And then there's the after. There's the resolution. There's the breakthrough. There's the relief of finally being on the other side. We are very comfortable talking about the before.

And we're very comfortable in talking about the after, but nobody talks about the middle. The middle is where I am right now. It's unclear. It's unresolved. It's uncomfortable. There's no breakthrough for me to report. There's no lesson that I've learned. There's no tidy ending. I'm just in it. And I have to keep going anyway. The middle is the hardest place to be because there's nothing to fix yet. There's no action that makes it stop. There's just the ongoing work of staying.

staying in it, staying steady while you wait for more information, while things develop, while the story unfolds in a way that you can't see yet. Most people don't know how to exist in the middle because we have been trained by culture, by hustle, by every personal develop message that we've ever consumed to fix things, to move through things, to move through them fast and to get to the resolution. But friend, the middle often doesn't work like that.

The middle asks something different. It asks you to sit. It asks you to stay, to not run from the uncomfortable, to not pretend it's over when it isn't, to be a person who can hold uncertainty without letting it undo you. That's hard. But you know what? It's supposed to be hard. And when it is, it's important that you know you're not doing it wrong. You're not behind. You're not failing. You're not doing it wrong. You're just in the middle.

And I want to tell you what's actually getting me through this. It's not a framework. It's not a strategy. It's not a mindset hack. The thing that is holding me up right now, the thing that I come back to when the fear gets loud, it's this. The other side is coming. And I will be better for having walked through this. I mean that in a deep, settled, bone level kind of way, not in a naive way.

not in a toxic positivity way. I mean it in the way that you mean something you've learned the hard way. And I guess this is where it becomes a benefit and not a cost that I'm in my mid 50s and have lived life a little bit. I have walked through hard times before. Seasons where I didn't know how it was going to turn out. When I was scared. When I was caring more than I wanted to carry. When I was making decisions I didn't want to make. When I was holding on while things felt like they might fall apart.

And every single time, and I mean every single time, I came out on the other side with something I didn't have going in. Personal strength that I didn't know I was capable of. A kind of resilience that doesn't come from easy seasons. It can't come from those. It only comes from the hard things. Clarity about who I am and what I'm made of that I could not have gotten any other way. And life lessons, real ones.

The kind that aren't theoretical, the kind that come from having lived something, the kind that I can now sit across from someone and say, you know what, I've been there. I know what this feels like. Here's what I learned. That's what I'm holding on to right now. Not that it's going to be OK in some vague, unspecified sort of way, but that I'm going to come out of this with something. That this season, as hard as it is, as exhausting as it is, as unclear as it is, it's doing something in me even now.

It's building something. And I don't want to miss what it's building by trying to rush through it, by numbing it, by pretending I'm not in it, by zooming past the uncomfortable parts before I've actually learned what those parts have to teach me. Because every single time, the discomfort, it has a purpose. The waiting has a purpose. Even the panic attack in the middle of the night, it had a purpose. It told me something true that I needed to hear.

that I'm allowed to be afraid, that I'm allowed to be uncertain, that I'm allowed to not have this figured out yet, and I'm going to be better because of it. The other side is coming, and I will be better. I will be stronger. I will be clearer, more equipped for having walked through this. So what do you actually do when you're here? My job right now is not to solve this. My job is to stay in it while I walk through it. My job is not to be fine.

My job is not to be fixed. My job is to be steady. Because fine means that you're pretending. Fixed means that it's resolved. Steady, it just means that you're still upright and that you are still moving. Not because everything is okay, but because you've decided to keep going anyway. And here's what that looks like for me. Number one, to name what I'm feeling and then I let myself feel it. Not make it something that it's not. Not wallow in it. Just feel it.

Fear is fear. Uncertainty is uncertainty. Calling it what it is, it takes some of its power. And it stops my nervous system from having to carry it all on its own. I'm carrying some of it then. Another thing I'm doing, the second thing I'm doing, is the next thing. I do the next thing. Not everything. I'm not trying to solve the next month, even the next day. I'm doing what's in front of me today. Maybe just this morning. Maybe just what's in front of me for the next 10 minutes.

It's the next decision. It's the next conversation. That's it. Just what's right in front of me. The third thing I'm doing is pulling back my brain when it wants to run ahead. Friend, my brain never stops running. I talk about that all the time. This is so hard for me to pull my brain back because it wants to run in all the places. When I catch myself spiraling into the what-ifs, I name it

and I come back to where I am right now. I don't need answers to the things that haven't happened yet. I'm gonna keep moving without waiting for clarity. I'm making decisions and I'm taking action. Not because I know how it's all gonna go, but because being frozen, it helps no one. You can move in a direction without knowing exactly where it leads. And I'm letting my body tell me when it's too much. I'm done overriding the signals. That 3 a.m. panic attack, that was a message and I'm listening now.

So if you're in a season like this, I want to say a few things. First, you are not failing. Not having answers, it does not mean that you are failing or that you are lacking in wisdom. Not having clarity doesn't mean that you're missing something. It just means that you're in the middle. And the middle takes as long as it takes. Man, do I wish that I had some sort of timeline for how long the middle was going to last. But you know what? It's going to be here until it's not anymore. Second.

The second thing I want to say to you is don't skip the feelings to get to the lesson. The lesson is there and it will wait. Rushing past what you're feeling, it doesn't make those feelings go away. It just makes them go underground. And underground feelings will have a way of surfacing and it will likely be when you least expect it and are least equipped to manage it. Ask me how I know the answer to this. Ask me how I know that that is true. Just sit in it. Name it. Let it be what it is.

Feelings, hard ones, messy ones, they're not weakness. Sitting in those feelings, that's the actual work that you need to do while you are in the middle. Third, hold on to the other side. Not naively, but in the deep, settled, I've been here before kind of way. The other side is coming. And if you do this right, if you actually walk through it, instead of around it, you will come out of this

with something that you did not have going in. Strength, resilience, wisdom, a story that you can hand to someone else who needs it. Those things, they matter. Hold on to that.

So friend, I'll have a lot more to share about this. I'll share more when I'm on the other side of this, when I have the full story, when I have the lesson learned, when I have the thing that I can wrap up and hand to you. But today, today, I just needed to show up and be honest about where I am, because I think there's something important about hearing it when and from someone who is still in it, who doesn't have it all figured out, who is scared sometimes.

who is naming the fear instead of pretending it isn't there, who had a panic attack in her sleep last week and is here anyway, who knows deeply, solidly knows that the other side is coming and that it will have been worth it. I am in this with you. And that, I know, is enough for today.