I think I may have stumbled onto a personal breakthrough with anxiety. It turns out that all these years, all I had to do was stop treating every bodily sensation as evidence. A tight chest did not automatically mean something was wrong.

It’s random, but I realized this on an evening walk in scorching heat. I’ve developed a complicated relationship with the city I grew up in. My anxiety shoots through the roof most of the times I step outside. It’s hot, humid, overcrowded, constantly under construction, and loud in a way that feels physically consuming. After living in the mountains for a while, coming back here has felt like throwing my nervous system directly into static.

A few weeks ago, during one of these walks, I felt the overwhelm rising again. Usually, that’s the moment my mind starts scanning for mental escape routes, explanations, or reasons to panic.

But this time, I don’t know why or how I just let the overwhelm pass through me without resisting it or assigning any meaning to it. The closest I can get to explaining that experience is how ocean waves work. The moment I stopped fighting the wave and let it move through me, it stopped feeling like I was drowning in it.  And to my surprise, it passed instantly without wreaking havoc on my being. Lol.

It felt incredibly liberating at the moment because I realized that most of my suffering came from not knowing what to do with what was happening in my mind or body. Especially during anxiety attacks, every physical response became something to decode, fix, or fear.

I’m beginning to notice how often I live entirely in my head, and now it almost feels like finding a missing puzzle piece. I interpret, analyze, and narrate, while my body is experiencing something completely different underneath all that noise.

I don’t know what it’s all about or why we experience what we experience. But it’s good to know how to navigate these experiences with presence and without judgment.

So now I’m trying to listen more carefully.

Since that experience, I’ve been applying this new practice to other feelings of discomfort, and it works each time.

An anxious nervous system can make excitement feel like danger. Fatigue can disguise itself as hopelessness. A dysregulated system may misinterpret peace as emptiness, pushing you to seek stimulation. Too much sensory input can be misread as irritation or rage. The way I interpret my body or the situations around me affects the kind of thoughts I think, and eventually the kind of reality I feel like I’m living in.

All the discourse around “healing your nervous system,” “mind-body connection,” and “listening to your body” finally makes sense now. I actually get it. Unfortunately for me, I don’t really learn through explanation alone. I have to arrive at things experientially. I have to live through them long enough for the understanding to land.

PS: I saved this on Pinterest years ago, not knowing how to sit with it. Now I do.