How a Panic Attack Made Me Prioritize My Mental Health
Key takeaways:
Julie Chavez had a panic attack that led to significant changes in her life.
It made her reflect on issues from her past and how to manage her feelings.
She ended up writing a memoir about her anxiety and depression and finding a supportive community.
Julie Chavez, a 44-year-old elementary school librarian, always loved books and dreamt of writing her own some day.
But she never imagined that book would be a memoir about anxiety and depression.
After having a panic attack in April 2018, Julie started to consider her mental health and how it affected different areas of life.
Today, she prioritizes her mental health. It involves paying a lot of attention to her feelings and making time for herself.
She had uncomfortable feelings from her past
Looking back, Julie, of Pleasanton, California, can remember times in her life when she needed help navigating her mental health.
She lost a close friend in high school. And at the time, “I didn’t know a lot of people who went to see a therapist,” she says.
Going through that difficult experience made Julie aware of her mental health. But she didn’t know how to articulate it at the time.
Once she had her first son, Julie experienced the baby blues. She says it bordered on postpartum depression. But she got through it and didn’t think about it again until after she survived her first panic attack.
Pushing down her feelings didn’t work
After spending 10 years as a stay-at-home mom, Julie went back to work in September 2017. As a self-defined achiever, she fit new demands into her already busy schedule.
“I took 30 hours of work at the school library and I put it right on top of everything [else] I did,” she says.
Even though she loved her life, she put a tremendous amount of pressure on herself.
At the time, she and her sons were also getting allergy shots, and she was trying to keep up with their sports schedules. But then she had a systemic reaction to one of the injections — and an extreme emotional reaction.
“There are a lot of people that have that happen and then go back” to get the rest of the shots, she says. “But I was so terrified of dying.”
Julie says she stopped taking care of herself and stuffed down this traumatic experience.
“I didn’t take any time to process that, and I didn’t even look at it,” she says. “I just pushed it down and kept moving.”
A panic attack became a turning point
Once allergy season came back around in the spring of 2018, Julie started having more general anxiety. She says it culminated in a panic attack at her son’s baseball game.
“I started having normal allergic symptoms. And I had this thought, ‘What if I messed up my system? And now I’m going to die from being out and about.’”
Julie went home and slept with the lights on that night. She says she felt like she could not escape the fear. From that day forward, her anxiety symptoms increased.
“It’s like a buzzing, full-body anxiety with a capital A,” she says. She felt like she was floating outside of herself. It became hard for her to focus at work.
It took a while to find the right therapist
Julie decided that she needed to get professional help to figure out her feelings. The trickiest part for her was reaching out.
“When you are depleted and burned out and you figure out you need help, that is not a good time to be looking for help because there are so many roadblocks,” she says.
The first therapist Julie met suggested she quit her job as a solution. But Julie didn’t like that option. It took 5 weeks for her to find a therapist she clicked with.
But after starting therapy, she still felt emotional.
“A lot of times when you are pushing your feelings down, then you open up Pandora’s box,” Julie says. “There is an initial surge.”
She got a diagnosis of depression and anxiety, but she remembers feeling disconnected.
“I’m a pretty resilient person,” she says. “So, for me to not be able to figure out how to manage my body was disorienting.”
Her doctor prescribed Zoloft, an antidepressant, to help her manage her symptoms.
She says it was like a life preserver “to lift me up so that I could start to swim. Then I could also figure out how I had gotten there.”
Things got better when she took life at a slower pace
Slowly, Julie started developing a rhythm of therapy, medication, and managing life.
“It was a process of slowing down,” she says. She paid attention to her triggers and feelings. And she found a community of support.
When she wrote her memoir, she was glad to be honest with herself and the people around her.
“Once you start talking, it releases the pressure,” she says. “It’s a matter of paying attention and finding what’s going to work for you.”
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