How It All Started, and Why That May Not Matter

When I gather information for these blogs and the podcast, or just to take the general temperature of what people are going through, I end up doing a fair amount of research. Not the kind most people do now, where you type something into a search bar or an AI and get back more results than you could ever use. I mean the kind that looks for the experiences of real people.

As I talk about in the book, one of the most valuable things I had to offer was not just firsthand understanding of the disorder and of recovery. It was a long history of talking with other people who had moved through this and come out the other side. People from all walks of life, all over the planet, different ages and backgrounds, every one of them with a unique story. My own journey took a long time, partly because it took me a while to find the right information, and partly because of stubbornness and a few personality traits that needed some work. But during that long stretch, I got a real look at how actual people recover. Not theoretical people in a textbook. Real ones.

I still do some of this research today, even though it is the exact thing I would tell anyone still in the thick of it not to do. You probably understand why by now. If not, it is laid out clearly in the book.

During some of that research this week, I landed on a page where people were asking questions and digging into the anxiety and panic issues that were making their lives so hard right now. I look at these stories differently these days, having worked my way through. But you cannot help feeling for people in that state, especially when you have been there yourself. And I have been, which is putting it mildly.

My job now, when I read these, is to look for patterns. Patterns that might help someone see which behaviors are worth keeping and which ones are quietly keeping them stuck. And the patterns are not hard to find. Anxiety disorder produces some very common habits, especially around analyzing, questioning, and searching for certainty. So common it is almost hard to believe.

The one that stood out

The pattern that jumped out at me on this particular day was the way people talk about how their condition started.

And who can blame them? When your life is moving along a certain way, and then in a short window, sometimes just a few moments, everything changes, of course the origin story matters to you. It mattered to me. In certain ways it still does. I open the book with the beginning of my own story, because it feels important, and because it is usually the part people relate to first. When you sit down to write something you hope people can lean on, taking them back to the start and letting them see their own story in yours is part of the job. There was plenty to learn from how mine began. The confusion, the mistakes, the way it touched everything.

So when I come across someone asking for help and wanting to tell us how they got here and how it felt, I never fault them for it. But over the years, that pattern recognition started raising a red flag. And it was a red flag that, in my own story, turned out to be enormous. Yet at the time I had no idea why.

As I scrolled through this long front page of people going into such detail about the origin of their condition, something clicked. There is an important distinction to be made here, and it is this. For the overwhelming majority of us, the circumstances surrounding how our condition started have very little to do with why it continued, or with how we set ourselves free.

A common, understandable bit of mental math gets baked into most of our origin stories early on. We assume that because something happened around the time the condition began, it must somehow explain the condition itself. Usually, it does not.

My own story

Let me use myself as the example.

Some of my first symptoms seemed heart-related. A racing heartbeat, some random numbness, things that felt medically scary. Even after I got a checkup and was told plainly that what I had was panic and nothing else, I kept right on focusing on my heart. Taking my pulse. Asking other people about their pulse. Searching and digging for answers about why my heart did what it did that night.

I had also taken some fairly common over-the-counter medications around that time, and believe me, my brain turned those into the culprit too. I dug around online until I found horror stories about them, which you will always find if you dig long enough. And I could go on like this, because I did. I peppered every anxiety forum I could find with my story, carefully laying out the details of the night of my first panic attack, certain that somebody out there would recognize a piece of it and become my savior with the one anecdote that explained everything.

But I never found a story exactly like mine. I found some that were close. Truthfully, though, so many of the details were different, and even that started to worry me. What if my condition came from a set of factors nobody had ever had? What if it was not anxiety or panic at all?

When the brain is drenched in fear, our ability to think logically gets dampened, while the adrenaline and the hunger for answers keep us digging anyway. But none of what I so badly wanted people to know mattered at all. It is human to want to be understood. There is probably even some early value in venting, if only to keep from bottling up something this strange. I wanted that too.

The proof it did not matter

Here is what finally showed me.

While my heart was the main concern early on, things shifted to other parts of my body fast. GI issues showed up. And of course I started chasing those down as the possible cause, taking probiotics and anything else I could get my hands on. All that research I had done on my heart went straight out the window, and I had moved on to the next thing.

See how the origin story loses its importance?

The fact that it hit my heart rate first did not matter. The over-the-counter medications did not matter. The headaches I had been getting leading up to that day might have been an early sign it was coming, but what was I going to do about it? That did not matter either. Yet I spent countless days and nights telling anyone who would listen, and plenty of people who would not, about all of it.

The time of day, the things we ate, the simple medication we may have taken. These can feel so important to a brain in a heightened state of fear. Once anxiety or panic disorder has been established, those details generally hold very little value in understanding why the cycle continues. They are just the circumstances of a particular day, and the symptoms your body happened to reach for in a particular moment.

So what actually matters

When something this severe drops into your life, no one can blame you for wanting your life back. So what story should you be telling?

The real answer is in the book, but the short version is this. Our beliefs, our personality, and our behavior matter far more than whatever we were doing the moment it arrived, or whichever symptoms the body chose to express it.

I did not have a nervous breakdown because something was wrong with my heart, or because I took medication for a headache. I had one because of a whole cluster of factors. Extreme life stress. Poor stress management. A nervous system that is probably tuned a little more sensitively than most. Add an analytical mind and a highly self-protective brain, and now we are finally talking about the parts of the story that actually matter.

Those are the factors that truly played into me entering a state of disorder-level anxiety and panic. And it is not something we can be expected to understand when the storm first hits. That is a big part of why I write about it. The way I see it, my purpose here is to help you get through this faster than I did. Learn from my mistakes. You do not have to spend years working it out. I am handing you the information.

Why this is good news

So here is the realization I hope you take with you. As important as the circumstances around your symptoms and your origin story feel, they are not the real story. They are noise. Very human, very understandable noise. My hope is to help you spot this pattern in yourself, and stop pouring energy into the beginning when the beginning is not the thing holding you back.

Understanding that how your condition started is relatively unimportant should actually fill you with optimism. Because you are not broken. A strange or frightening beginning does not make your case any less recoverable than anyone else's. No matter how scary or how unique your onset story is, the fundamental recovery strategies apply to you exactly as much as they apply to anyone with a completely different story.

So when you hear me say that how this started did not matter, please hear it as good news. For me, finally arriving at that realization was one of the most important positive turns I made in recovery. It cleared the way for my focus to shift to the right things, and to finally start making progress.

If this is the kind of thing you want more of, the mailing list is where to be. Sign up and I will send you the first two chapters of the book for free, and you can suggest topics or ask questions for a future episode while you are there. I respect your inbox and keep it simple.