Overcoming Agoraphobia

Do you feel anxious every time you're in a situation you can't easily get out of? You might have agoraphobia! I suffered with this fear for YEARS, and learned some really effective techniques for overcoming it and getting to live the life I had only ever dreamed of. In today's episode I share my story and the easy-to-follow steps I took to gain back my freedom. Enjoy! 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to the 18 Minutes Podcast. Happy Friday. Happy September. Happy almost fall. Personally, I am one of those people that gets really sad when summer ends. I love fall. I'm excited for fall. I love September of October, but I am really sad that summer is dwindling. I just love being outside. I live in Minnesota, and so the winter time just gets a little bit challenging getting around, doing activities outdoors. And I'm kind of a lizard. I like to just bask in the sun and warm up my bones. And those days are numbered, unfortunately. But I also love fall and I'm really excited about some fall activities. I'm excited about some things I'm working on this fall. So things are good. One of the things I have been working on is getting my one-on-one coaching set up and ready to go. And that is now live by the time you're listening to this. You can go to amandaclay.com and sign up for a one-on-one coaching session with me. And we can talk about your fear, what kind of anxiety things you're working on. I'm not a therapist, so this is not like a therapy session, but um I do have a lot of experience overcoming different um fear-related things, as you might know. And I love to help people get unstuck and figure out what they need to do next to continue on their journey, to move forward, especially if you're starting out and you don't even know like where to look, what kind of therapist to look for. I would love to help you figure that out. So if that is interesting to you, if you want to take the next step in your journey in overcoming fear, then that is available to you at amandaclay.com. There's all kinds of free resources there as well. That's where I host all of the stuff that I offer. So check that out if you haven't yet. And let's get into today's episode. Quick reminder that I am not a therapist or a medical professional, and everything I share on this show is based on my own personal experience with fear and anxiety, my journey overcoming those things, and research that I do for the show. So this is not a replacement for therapy. Please take only what is helpful to you, leave what isn't, and talk to your medical and mental health professionals first. So today I wanted to talk specifically about agoraphobia. This is something I've come to realize a lot of younger people are getting familiar with. Agoraphobia is the fear of being in situations where escape might be difficult or embarrassing. And it's a really common fear, especially in people who have panic disorder. And I don't know why, but younger people seem to know what this is, and people my age and older are less familiar with it. So you might experience this if you have panic disorder and not even know that there's a name for it. So it's an intense fear of situations that are difficult to escape. And essentially that makes us feel trapped. And so it's not claustrophobia, like small fear of small spaces, and it's not specifically just a fear of feeling trapped, but it's like being in a situation where you're going to have a difficult time escaping. And almost always that includes the fear of our own bodies in that situation and worrying that we'll have a panic attack. For me, agoraphobia was very closely associated with a lack of control. I, my whole life, have been someone who likes to organize and plan and have set expectations. And so when I was in situations where I wasn't sure how things were gonna go, that would trigger anxiety and sometimes panic in me. And there were lots and lots of situations that I felt trapped that maybe if you haven't experienced this, don't really make sense, but they would initiate this sense that I was going to be trapped in some way, and then I would start panicking. So my list of things that I was scared of at one point when things got really bad included traveling, any kind of travel, planes, cars, trains. I felt like I was trapped and couldn't get out. Like a plane, you kind of like you can't get out, right? But even in a car, it felt like I'm kind of trapped in the car. If I'm on a train, I'm kind of trapped in the train. Uh eating at restaurants, I that one doesn't make sense to a lot of people who haven't had this experience. But sitting at a restaurant with a group of people and not being able to leave. Like I can't just without being embarrassed or awkward or making people feel weird, I can't get up and leave the restaurant. I first of all, I have to pay for my food. And one of my major triggers at one point was waiting for my check at a restaurant because I'm kind of trapped there. Like I'm not literally trapped there. I could leave, but not without consequences. So restaurants were a major trigger of mine. Waiting in lines, like a checkout line, um, that was would always give me this sensation of being trapped. Like, I what am I gonna do? I'm stuck here, I can't move. Um, I don't know why this ends up happening because I'm not physically trapped, but it's just this like almost a social kind of trap. I can't, with a cart full of stuff, like what am I gonna do? Just leave it there and go out to my car. Like, I'm kind of stuck there, and so that would trigger feelings of anxiety. Um, any kind of appointment, like a doctor appointment, um, and that for a whole other reason, like medical stuff was really triggering for me, but a hair appointment or a nail appointment, sitting in a chair for an hour plus and not being able to leave, it would make me feel trapped and very agoraphobic. Also, social events where you are like weddings or baby showers or things like that where you're in a group of people and it would be weird to get up and leave. I would force myself to do those kinds of things, and I'll talk about that in a little bit, but I would feel really trapped in those kinds of environments. Also, driving was a huge trigger of mine, especially on the freeway. I would feel very trapped in that situation, and it would cause me to panic. And so eventually I just avoided all of those things. And as you can imagine, if I'm not driving or waiting in lines or going to appointments or being in social situations that aren't awkward to leave, I'm not um traveling anywhere, there's not a lot that I could do without feeling anxious after I started avoiding all those things, and my fear of them actually grew. And my agoraphobia got to a point where the only situation, the only context I was truly comfortable and relaxed in was being at home in my bed. Even walking downstairs to my kitchen was something that would cause me to feel anxious sometimes. Like I was very, very agoraphobic. And even I remember there were situations where I was in my bed and my heart would start, my heart rate would start increasing a little bit, or I would feel a heart palpitation, and then there was no safety. I would just spiral immediately into a panic attack because I'm in my safe place and I'm not feeling safe anymore, and so I felt like I had no options, and that would make me panic too. So it was very, very intense. So I'm very familiar with agoraphobia. I had a really intense, severe version of it, and for me it went in waves. I remember being slightly agoraphobic as a teenager, didn't know what it was at the time. I was just afraid of these kinds of situations where escaping was difficult or embarrassing. And then I remember having a really good season, and I actually went on a long road trip with a friend and um had some anxiety, but minimal anxiety. And then um in my early 20s, I had um horrible agoraphobia again, and so it just kind of came in and out throughout my life, starting when I was a teenager. Um, and like I mentioned, I would try to force myself to go through some of these situations just because I felt like maybe it was worth trying, or the consequences of not doing it were greater than the consequences of going and having a lot of anxiety. Forcing myself to go to a social event, for example, was almost always super defeating and tiring because I would go to these events and the whole time I would be gritting my teeth, white knuckling my way through it, just like waiting for the most like the first appropriate moment to be able to leave. And that's really sad. I wasn't able at that time in my life or those times of my life to be present with people when I wasn't in my own home. And it was really discouraging. And I I remember feeling a lot of times like I I wish I would have just stayed home. This is so uncomfortable. I'm so anxious. I can't focus on having a conversation with any of these people. Um, and I it really affected my memory, which is something I didn't learn until later that anxiety um affects our ability to retain memory. And so a lot of those situations, I hardly even remember the details of them because I was so nervous and anxious and afraid. My nervous system was like at a 10 out of 10, and I don't even hardly remember them. And yeah, at the time, I just wanted to go home. I wished I hadn't tried, and then I would go home, I'd be exhausted, I would cry, I would feel like a failure, embarrassed, and wishing I could just be a normal person that could enjoy normal activities. I was completely miserable, um, living really a shell of a life. I wasn't having new experiences, I wasn't growing, I was getting worse mentally and physically. I could hardly move my body without getting anxious because I was so afraid of my physical health too. If I noticed my heart racing or I was having heart palpitations, that would send me into a panic too. So I really wasn't having like a full human experience or really even close to it. I was miserable, stuck in my house, really, really not doing well at all. And I remember laying in my bed one day and sort of having this realization that I was never going to see certain places. I had always wanted to travel to Europe and see all of the history there. I've always been really into history, and um yeah, I was realizing like that's never gonna happen. Like in my whole life, I'm never gonna go to Europe, I'm never gonna go to Asia, I'm never gonna see Australia, I'm probably never gonna see the ocean, I'm never gonna see South America, Central America, um, like maybe Canada because I'm in Minnesota and like that's kind of close, and like maybe that would happen, you know, to at least be able to say I've been to a different country. But um, yeah, I kind of resigned to the fact that I would never get on an airplane because I couldn't even leave my house. Like that just would that wasn't a possibility for me. And I kind of um reconciled with that by thinking there are so many, I mean, almost everyone throughout history didn't travel to other countries. A lot of people didn't leave like the village that they uh were born in, you know, and if that was good enough for them, that was good enough for me. So I just I tried to make myself feel better about that and and tried to figure out mentally how I was going to make this kind of life worth living for myself. Like, what could I do from my bed that would feel worthwhile to me? And I couldn't come up with anything. I couldn't come up with a single thing, and I got really depressed and I felt like my life really didn't have a purpose or a meaning, and I have all of these values like being kind, helping people, being supportive, um, growth, you know, art, nature, people, connection, relationships, and I couldn't participate really in any of my values in the situation I was in. And so then I realized if I don't work on this even a little bit to get to a point where I could at least spend time with my friends and family, because I couldn't at that time I couldn't even go visit my parents without having a panic attack. So if I could work on this enough to where I could spend time with people that I care about, maybe that small change will make me feel like my life is worth something. And if I don't, I could get even worse. And I at that point, I I couldn't even imagine what worse would be. I was stuck in my house, like in my bed, fearing my own body and my own mind. I could not picture what worse would be like, and I did not want to know what that was like. So I learned how other people had overcome agoraphobia. I listened to podcasts, I read books, I read articles on exposure and response prevention and other techniques for starting to overcome agoraphobia and panic disorder. What I learned is that I almost definitely developed agoraphobia through my own patterns of avoiding the feelings of fear that I would get in these situations where I felt like I was gonna be stuck or trapped. Because I hated feeling anxious and I didn't think or believe that I could actually move through a situation while my heart was racing, while my palms were sweaty, while I was shaking, while I'm short of breath, while my fight or flight system is telling me, yelling at me, really, to run away from the situation and soothe myself. But I learned that other people had felt the same way that I felt and actually started to climb their way out of this hole that they were in. And one of the first tools I learned about was a fear ladder. Essentially, what that is is listing your fears from least anxiety-inducing to absolutely terrifying, and then using that as a plan for facing your fears and starting with the smallest, least triggering until that situation doesn't trigger you anymore, until it doesn't make you anxious anymore. So I thought, okay, I can I'm gonna take this one step at a time. I can make a list of all my fears. And honestly, even that experience like kind of made me nervous because I'm I'm thinking about things I'm afraid of. And um so I had this really big list, and my least anxiety-inducing fear was sitting in my parked car in my driveway without driving anywhere. Like I said, being outside of the walls of my home was making me anxious, and so that was a fear that I had, but like the least intense fear that I could come up with. The most intense fear on that list was flying on an airplane, and then there were like 25 or 30 things in between. So I thought I really have nothing left to lose. I'm not really living a life, and I'm at a point where I would rather I'm gonna suffer either way. So I would rather suffer in a way that's actually making progress and not suffer in a way that is going to potentially make me even worse. I was terrified of getting worse. So I started facing my fears, starting with that first fear on the list: sitting in my parked car by myself. So I planned to sit in my car for 20 minutes every single day by myself and let myself feel scared without doing anything about it. And I did that every day. I would walk out to my car, I would get in, I would turn the engine on, I would start getting pretty anxious, my heart would race, my palms got sweaty, I was getting short of breath, a little bit lightheaded. Um, my thoughts were racing. I wanted to go back in, I wanted to quit every single time, and I thought I can do this for 20 minutes. I'm I'm I'm gonna suffer either way. I would I remember telling myself that all the time like just pick your hard. This could actually make me feel better. So this is the hard that I'm picking today, right now, for these 20 minutes. And after five or six days, I stopped fearing that situation. I went out to my car on the fifth day, got in, turned the car on, and I had no symptoms. I my heart didn't race, my palms didn't get sweaty, I wasn't short of breath, I didn't get lightheaded. I had no idea how long it was gonna take. Um, I was willing to try it for like a week. I remember thinking if nothing changes in a week, I don't know if I'm gonna keep doing this, but um yeah, after about five or six days, I my body reacted differently to that trigger. And I had learned about neural connections and neural pathways, and that this exposure kind of practice where you accept your feelings of fear, you allow yourself to actually feel afraid, which was a completely new concept to me. Um, your neural connections and your neural pathways actually change. You make new paths in your brain. The new path I was trying to make in general was that feeling anxious isn't dangerous and not something that my brain has to send these fight or flight signals to save me from. And so the context really mattered a lot less than actually just facing fear of any kind and allowing myself to feel it and not run away from it. So then on that fifth or sixth day, I have no symptoms. I still did it. I still sat in the car for 20 minutes, like waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened. And I knew at that point that the next day when I was going to practice this and do this work to make myself better, I was gonna move to the next fear on my fear ladder. And at that time, it was driving my car just around my block. Like I live on a city block, so that's the smallest distance I could possibly drive. And I just drove around and around for 20 minutes like a weirdo, and allowed myself to feel anxious and nervous, also embarrassed because I just assumed everybody was looking out their windows, watching me do this and wondering what on earth I was doing. And I just kept driving around and around and I did that. I don't remember how long that one took, but after a while, I didn't fear getting my car and driving around the block anymore. It was boring to me. It felt like this is pointless. I'm just driving around, it doesn't make me nervous, there's no symptoms. And so at that point, I moved on to the next one. That was driving to the grocery store and back, which was about a half a mile from my house. Just driving there and back, not going in, not getting out of my car. Drive there, drive home. That's the exposure. I did that over and over again. And then when that didn't make me anxious, I actually got out of my car, went into the grocery store, walked around, walked out without buying anything. And I did that every day until it didn't make me anxious. And then um, that one I remember being quick, like after one or two times of walking into the grocery store and walking out, I was like, okay, I can do that. So then I went in and I bought one thing, and I remember it very vividly. You maybe have heard this story, but I walked into the grocery store and I went over to the dessert section and I bought a pint of chocolate ice cream and I waited in line and I bought my ice cream and I drove home and I ran upstairs to this office. My husband Tom was working here, and I just showed him the pint of ice cream with this massive smile and tears in my eyes, and we celebrated because being able like at that point, we could both see that this was going to change my life for the better. And I'm like getting emotional thinking about it now because if you are experiencing this, you know how debilitating and how exhausting it is to have agoraphobia and panic disorder. And to feel like your life is purposeless and directionless and meaningless and it's so sad and it's so hard. And when I was able to go into the grocery store and do something for myself, it was so it gave me so much hope. And it was a really big moment in my life. It sounds silly to like go into a store and buy a pint of ice cream, but it was a huge, huge deal for me. And I knew them every time I overcame one of these fears, I was more and more confident that I might actually have been wrong about never getting to see the world. Because if I could do this, I mean, I it's the same thing. I was exposing myself to my fear of being trapped in places and like not being able to escape and the fear of my own body and the fear of having a panic attack in public, like all of these things were fears I was overcoming. And I thought, if I can handle experiencing fear, and if I can be willing to feel fear in these contexts, maybe I could be willing to feel fear in these other contexts. And so I just kept working my way up this ladder in the smallest increments. And and I will, I'll tell you, there were some situations where I would jump to a fear and it would be way too hard for me. I had a lot of bad days throughout this process, and um, I would back it off and I would do smaller, smaller increments, and I just I adjusted constantly and I made it work so that whatever it took for me to just be consistent, that's all I did. Every day I would face some kind of discomfort or fear or anxiety, and it wasn't perfect. I learned as I went, but I was able to um move through it quicker than I thought I would have been able to. I also at this time started doing a lot of meditation. So um I have talked about this. I think meditation sometimes can be used in what I consider a negative way, like as a means of escaping our feelings or escaping our present reality. I love meditation for kind of the opposite. Like when I'm already feeling good, I'm not anxious, I'm not stressed, I'm not worried about anything, I'm not trying to escape anything, then I practiced a guided meditation and I would practice redirecting my attention back to it as naturally my mind would wander, especially at the beginning. And I gave myself this space to practice mental health tools when I wasn't anxious and scared. So things like meditation, eating better, eventually I started adding like daily movement into my routine. That that did take a while because, like I said, I was very scared of my body, especially my heart. So that took a little while. But um I did add daily movement back in, um, drinking water, sleeping well, like those kinds of things gave me more space and more capacity to continue doing the challenging work of facing these fears and being willing to feel that fear and kind of move through it. So I highly recommend meditation. That was something that was super, super helpful to me in this process of overcoming agoraphobia. And it it did help me maybe a little bit feel less anxious in general or like less stressed, but way more than that, it helped me practice focus. It like I built my focus muscle, and so I was able to intentionally direct my thoughts, and that helped me a lot when I was doing exposure work because this is really challenging. Like I said, I had a lot of situations that were like really difficult, like too hard for me, and yeah, it was a it was a challenge, it was the hardest thing to date I've ever done in my life, and I don't say that to scare you, like quite the opposite. It was very challenging. It wasn't a constant challenge. I did it for 20 minutes a day, and then after like five months, I was telling people that I had recovered from panic disorder and agoraphobia. So, yes, it was very challenging. Was it worth it? A hundred thousand million times, yes. I would do it again immediately if I had to. I would do it over and over and over because it was completely worth every second of suffering and challenge and exhaustion and um every negative feeling I had like pales in comparison to the euphoria that I felt and that I still sometimes feel when I get to do things that I thought were never gonna be on the table for me. So the challenge is part of the process. I would absolutely have days where I would plan facing a fear and I would go out and attempt it, and I thought it was gonna be easy for me, and then I would end up having a massive panic attack and quitting and going home early. And that's part of the process. If you think of mental health like physical health, it's easy to imagine that you're going to have days or weeks even where you're tired, you feel off, and you're not as strong. And that's okay. You can back off the intensity of the training to a more manageable level while you're in a season of feeling more tired, but you don't sit around for three weeks and do nothing. And even if you do end up doing that, if you sit around for three weeks and do nothing, you just start again. You don't lose all of your progress because you haven't done it in a little while. Like you have still built skills and muscles, and um, they're also easier to build once you've built them in the past, even if they do atrophy a little bit. That's like physical muscles work that way. Our brains work that way too. You've already started paving this new path, and those tracks in our minds, those pathways are still there. They just need to be made deeper, and so you can just jump back in, try it again. It's gonna be hard if you take a long break and you jump back in, but you've already done it and you know what it feels like. So you can just you can just start again. After that first exposure, where I started to notice my symptoms going away, I was so motivated to keep going. I started to drive to work by myself after like one or two months of practicing. And I was going to the grocery store by myself, going to friends' parties, uh, going to my parents' house, going to the family cabin that was like two hours away. My world really started to open up the more I practiced and the more fear I was willing to face. And I kind of touched on this already, but it is really, really important that you understand that facing fear means feeling it. If I had practiced facing my fears, and the whole time I'm sitting in my parked car, I'm blasting the AC, listening to music, um, tapping my legs, chewing sour candy and sipping cold water so that hopefully I don't actually feel any fear during this exposure, I would not have gotten better. And I know that because I tried that. I tried forcing myself to do things and not allowing myself to feel anxious about it or feel uncomfortable. And my fears got bigger and my life got worse. When we use soothing behaviors like the ones that I just mentioned, when we're in a anxiety-inducing situation, we're actually proving to our brains that that situation is dangerous. We're we're telling our brains through our behavior that this situation and these feelings we're having are dangerous in a way that we need to be saved from. That's why a lot of people call them safety behaviors. And agoraphobia and panic isn't something that's actually going to hurt us. So we don't need that fear. But we're when we behave in a way that says this is not something that I can experience safely, our brains learn that lesson and they believe it. So being willing to face a fear and being willing to feel afraid without soothing myself, soothing yourself, is a massively important part of this process. So I kept moving up my fear ladder until I reached the top, which was getting on an airplane. I planned a weekend trip that was a short flight away, it was about an hour and a half flight. And I was fully expecting to have a panic attack on an airplane, and I was willing to have a panic attack on an airplane because I had done all this work building my confidence and I knew that I could handle it. I knew it would be uncomfortable. I would rather not have a panic attack on a plane, but I was willing to do it. And I think because I was so willing to have that experience, I didn't end up panicking at all. I was nervous for the flight beforehand, and I was a little nervous when I'm sitting on the plane, but I ended up having an amazing time. Also, side note, I didn't know at the time that if you fly southwest, I do think they changed this recently, but if you fly southwest, you don't pick your seats ahead of time. It's like it's first come, first serve based on how early you check in or if you like paid to get a you know, a spot at the front of the line. And Tom and I didn't check in right away, and so we couldn't actually sit together. And that was something that I mean, I didn't know that was gonna happen. I assumed I'd be sitting next to him, so we couldn't even sit next to each other on my first flight I had ever been on. And I ended up sitting next to this delightful woman who chatted with me the whole time. I told her my story, how I had never been on a plane, that I was really anxious. This was like my biggest fear. Um, and she chatted with me the whole flight. It was amazing. I loved that plane ride, and I learned that I really love flying. It is really cool and really fun when you're not so worried about how your body is going to react in that environment. It's very cool. It's so beautiful to see the earth from that height and from that point of view. And so I had a great time. I had a great weekend too. And there were definitely a couple points where I got anxious because that happens. I wasn't used to traveling, it was a new experience, and um, but I had a great time. I I biked around a new city, I ate at a lot of restaurants, I stayed at a hotel very far away from my house, and it was incredible. To be honest, I still get anxious about things. Everyone does, but I'm very willing to put myself in situations that might not go exactly as I planned because I've practiced putting myself in situations that might not go exactly as I planned, and I've proven to myself that I can enjoy it and that I can come out on the other side having had a really good experience. All I've done in this whole process, and all thousands and thousands of other people have done to overcome agoraphobia is be consistent, practice facing fear, allowing ourselves to feel fear and moving through it without fighting against it. And the consistency is something that anyone can do. If you're willing to show up every day and do something that makes you uncomfortable without running away from the discomfort or soothing yourself out of it, you will prove to your brain that you are safe in these situations and you will overcome agoraphobia. I say this all the time, but I'm not a special person. I'm very regular. I don't, I'm not especially strong-willed or uh smart or capable. I'm very average. And if I can do this, if I can go from being stuck in my house, the way I want afraid of the world, afraid of my body, to traveling on airplanes, traveling around the world, going to restaurants, going to the grocery store, going to social situations, and enjoying it, you can do it too. If you have questions about agoraphobia or anything else I discussed today, or you have another topic that you'd like to find on the podcast, please send me a message. I would love to hear it. Email me at Amanda at AmandaClay.com or send me a DM on any of my social channels at heyamandaclay. Reminder again about online coaching. If that's something that you're interested in, if you want to take the next step and have some personalized your support on this journey to overcome phobia, panic disorder, or any fear in general. I would love to help you. So please go to amandlay.com slash resources and sign up for such a thank you so much for being here, and I'll see you next time.