The Science of Anxiety

A poem about anxiety

To me, emotions can be represented as dots on a graph or narratives of a lived experience.

To some, the gut feeling is to say that emotion, something so experiential is better described and understood through lived experience than trying to fit it into some box to understand why.

I used to believe this too.

In time I learned they both hold their own.

In experience, my anxiety is out of control, a firey red experience of sirens alerting me to every sensory experience, it blares and it blares, like it will never end.

Lived experience alone led me to believe that panic attacks could only go on forever and that because I felt like I was going to die meant that that would happen.

Science told me otherwise giving me the average of everyone’s experience delineating the limits of variation (i.e., just how different everyone could be) for some semblance of control.

It told me of the average narrative, that panic attacks subside once that parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, and the only reason they were there in the first place is my sympathetic nervous system is my body’s fire alarm alerting me to the burnt omelette threat that could be a fire but most likely is not.

Understanding that even in this most frightening of experiences my body is there despite feeling like the world is ending actually trying to protect me but perhaps in an erroneous way

gave me the power to softly climb on a stepstool and softly press that button that says shh there is no fire and we are safe.

There is power in both narratives in describing what we know what we experience and how we know.

Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) wants to thank R. Rangan PhD for this poem prompt: Science of emotions. In turn, I want to tag Rebecca Stevens A. | Jade-Ceres Violet D. Munoz | Blank Voice | Baye Amina to try this out!