Stress and self-care, the secret to resolving big, overwhelming feelings. This is the story of how I had cataclysmic level panic attacks and my realization of how to stop them. When I say cataclysmic level, I mean I was curled up in a fetal ball on the floor screaming, "I don't want to die," while meanwhile it was a bright, sunny day with zero threat.

Another time, I was on an airplane and absolutely convinced that, for whatever reason, I was going to fall through the airplane to my death. It was such an absurd notion that I could even logically see that the laws of physics would not change just for me. But my body didn't seem to get the message. So I sat in extreme panic until the plane landed.

Every night in my apartment in Seattle, as the sun would set, a massive amount of panic would set in, and I didn't know how to handle it. Everything I did seemed to make it worse. I remember being out on my boat with some friends and seeming OK externally. But internally, I was freaking out and barely holding it together. It was really bad.

A few months later, a group of us went to go see How to Train Your Dragon 2 in theaters, and about 3/4 of the way through the movie, I was wrestling with my own anxiety internally, like I always did, and then something changed. Before, the thoughts were always, fight the anxiety, fight the anxiety, fight the anxiety. I should be able to do something. I should not have anxiety. I am feeling anxious, but I shouldn't feel anxious, but I shouldn't feel that I'm feeling anxious. So now I'm just stupid. But I know that I shouldn't feel that I'm stupid. And then just more anxiety. Now I feel guilty for feeling all these things, and I'm just stressed out. But I shouldn't even feel stressed out.

That was my normal loop, which happened pretty much every waking hour. It got to the point where I would be grateful for the first 5 seconds I was awake because that part of my brain hadn't booted up yet and I had some momentary peace. So anyway, about 3/4 of the way through the movie, I remember thinking, I'm done. I refuse to play this game anymore. I'm not going to do the game of trying to fix and resist my anxiety anymore. If I quit, my anxiety overwhelms me and kills me, then so be it. But I am done.

And the weird thing is, as soon as I had that thought, the anxiety stopped pretty darn immediately. The profound realization I had during the movie is that the thing I was calling anxiety wasn't the sensation of overwhelm and panic I felt. It was the response of me trying to suppress how I felt and control it and deny it and fix it.

Once I stopped denying it, stopped resisting it, and stopped trying to fix it, the anxiety went away. I was sitting there in the movie and thinking, there's the feeling. Cool. It's getting bigger. It's getting bigger. It's getting bigger. It's getting bigger. And then it crested like a wave, and the anxiety was gone.

Think about this for a second. What if the most wise, loving, attuned response that you could give yourself was to do nothing, not some old, cold, uncaring, resigned "I give up" feeling, but instead a loving, caring, holding response. What if the wisest thing to do is to realize that it is the abandonment of these feelings that causes the anxiety and to invite them back in rather than trying to suppress them, to invite them back into you rather than trying to get rid of them, control them, change them, tweak them, suppress them, ignore them, or deny them?

During that movie, I realized the answer was to stop playing the game entirely, stop fighting the anxiety, realize that, yes, occasionally you'll have feelings that get a little big, but they will never be more than big feelings until you resist them.

The dominant Western cultural story isn't helpful here. It says, you shouldn't feel that way. Feelings are bad. Feelings are evil. Don't let your emotions get the best of you. Don't feel angry. Don't be sad. Be happy. Don't feel this way. Feel that way. Some feelings are bad. Some feelings are good. You shouldn't feel the ones that are bad, and if you're feeling the ones that are bad, don't. And if you continue to, then it's a character judgment and a moral failing on your part.

But what we've taught ourselves as a society is to just disconnect, drink, take drugs, do what you need to do so you don't feel the pain, look at your phone. Feelings are bad. If you have a headache, don't go and fix the headache. Don't figure out what's wrong. Just take Tylenol, and then you don't even notice you have a headache, and then you're good, our culture says. However, the answer to those overwhelmed feelings is to go towards them and allow the feelings to happen and let your body take over and do what it does best.

Our body has an inbuilt uncomfortable feeling resolution mechanism. It has a way of emotional regulation that works without you having to do anything. In other words, your nervous system already has a way to deal with and resolve those big feelings. If you've ever watched Scooby-Doo, you know what I'm talking about. Shaggy and Scooby are always shaking in fear. So here's my question to you-- why shaking? Are they cold?

As it turns out, the shaking is our nervous system's way of resolving the pent-up energy that comes from overwhelm. If it is allowed to take its course, then those feelings get resolved. If you'd like to know more, I'd highly suggest reading The Revolutionary Trauma Release Exercises by Dr. David Berceli and In an Unspoken Voice by Dr. Peter Levine.

How to connect to yourself. What I want to do right now is get in a comfortable position and just notice how you're feeling. Check in with yourself and your body. Is your stomach gurgling? Do you have a little pain in your shoulder? What's going on?

For example, as I write this, my throat hurts a little bit and my back aches slightly. So I'm just going to check in and notice those things. And then, instead of trying to fight it, instead of messing with my shoulder to try to fix it and put it in the right position, instead of trying to suppress the fact that my throat hurts a little bit, instead of trying to hold my back in a different position, I'm just going to invite those sensations in. I'm going to notice that I feel a little bit of anxiety. It's in the back of my neck there. I'm just going to invite that feeling in. I'm just going to allow it to happen. I'm just going to observe it and not try to change it and not try to do anything other than just allow it and invite it in.

And as you do that, what you'll notice is that your body begins to reset itself on its own. You begin to feel a little better. You may feel a little bit overwhelmed at first, depending on how big the sensation is. But then things get easier, mainly because you stopped fighting it. So whenever I feel anxious, whenever I feel disconnected, whenever I feel stressed, I take a moment, I stop, and I reset myself and allow my feelings to happen.

So here's my life now. I'm relaxed. I enjoy life. I have a thriving friend group, and life is good. Now, there's still the occasional panic attack, but the difference is that it no longer affects me at all. About a month ago, I woke up in the middle of the night after having a dream more terrifying than any I'd had since I was 13, just completely confused. I didn't know where I was, and I was in a completely different mindset. I felt that same feeling I used to feel when I had daily panic attacks, like I literally could die at any moment. The floor is lava, and I just don't have any ground to stand on.

But rather than a multiple-hour event, the actual panic attack took about 1 minute. And then 4 minutes later, I thought, I'm going back to bed, and I did. So there's the difference right there. I'll still have the panic. I'll still freak out about it. But it won't be this 3-hour massive event. It will just be this small little blip and then no residual effects at all.

Advanced allowing. I wanted to go back to the story of my terrible panic attacks I mentioned in the How to Resolve Big, Overwhelming Feeling section. Remember, these panic attacks were bad. Every night as the sun would go down, I would send myself into a massive, full-blown, cataclysmic, "I could die at any moment" panic attack. And it was miserable. I'm talking cataclysmic level destruction at any moment. And I thought I was going to literally die.

Now, rationally, that's utterly absurd. But that's the level of panic attack that I was experiencing. It was clouding my vision and my judgment so much that one time when I was on a plane I thought I was going to fall through the airplane, as if the laws of physics were going to stop applying and I was going to fall through the seat fabric, through the underbody of the plane, and then out.

And that's completely not how physics work, but that's the level of panic attack and irrational fear that I had. I would always fight with myself, too, trying to push down the anxiety, trying to manipulate the anxiety, trying to change the anxiety, trying to say, I shouldn't be this way, and trying to fix it in any and every way imaginable. It was like, I know all the personal development techniques. I should be able to get rid of my anxiety because anxiety is the enemy and I will crush the enemy.

And so I would push it down. I'd resist it. I'd fight it, and I'd try to manipulate it and change it. And nothing worked. And then, one day, I was going to see How to Train Your Dragon 2 with some friends in theaters, and everything changed.

So here's what I learned from that night. Your body has a natural inbuilt trauma resolution mechanism. For any stress, discomfort, anxiety, trauma, et cetera, your body has an inbuilt self-regulation mechanism to get rid of all that stuff and bring you back to a state of homeostasis, bring you back to a state of regulation, if you let it happen.

So imagine you're on the sidewalk watching cars go by and you say, OK, there's a car. There's a car. There's another car. Oh, there's a really, really ugly car. No, I don't want to deal with that at all. So you get in the middle of the street and you say, stop, I don't want to see you anymore. But now you're staring the car down, and you're going to continue to see it until you get out of the way and let it continue on its way so that it gets out of your field of vision.

It's the same thing that happens when you have any uncomfortable feeling. The reason why I was having so many panic attacks is because when my body would try to get rid of the panicky feeling and resolve the anxiety I would have to feel it. And then I would go and resist that and tell my body to stop. But by saying, stop, I don't want to feel or see these feelings, I was preventing the feeling from actually getting out of my way and letting me move on.

To put it another way, just be. Allow. Be the lightning rod and let it go through one side and out the other. Don't resist. Just observe your feelings. Let it happen. The more that you allow and observe, the better it gets, because then your body knows what to do. Let your body handle it and just go along for the ride.

I got so scared with the panic attacks and anxiety, because I thought if I just allowed it, it would never end. Unless I did something about it, it was going to continue forever. That's just simply not the truth. It continued for about 30 seconds, and then it stopped for good.

So for me, this has profound implications. All you need to do is be with it. All you need to do is just sit there and hold yourself, soothe yourself, and treat yourself right. And your body will actually resolve its own uncomfortable feelings and traumas. You don't need to control it. You don't need to fix it. You don't need to do anything except be with the feeling.

Now, sometimes, if you have trouble being with the feeling, you may want somebody to help you go through that process, like a somatic therapist. I've had to hire many, many therapists over the years, and I've found the most personal success with somatic-based therapists. If you are in the Bay Area of California, I highly recommend looking up Ava [INAUDIBLE], whom I have used extensively and can vouch for.

So right now let's try 30 seconds of allowing your feelings. What I want you to do is just notice whatever in your body naturally brings your attention to it. For me, right now, it's my lower back. So I'm just going to notice my lower back. I can encourage you to do the same thing. Just notice what you're feeling.

And don't try to change it at all. Don't try to do anything. Don't try to manipulate it or control it or mess with it at all. Just simply observe it and give it space. And what you'll notice is that as you observe it and give it space, it may start to change a little bit. Just observe that. And notice that too.

So what happens for me is, as I notice what I'm noticing and simply observe and let it happen, that pain in my lower back is now mostly gone. And so things shift and change and move on their own. And you don't actually need to do much. All you need to do is stay with the feeling.

So in short, in order not to feel anxious, you need to feel anxious. In other words, if you're feeling anxious, you feel the anxiety. You observe it. You let it go through your system, and you don't try and change or manipulate or control or force or coerce or change it at all. After you practice this new way of thinking, you slowly go back to trusting yourself. You know what to do, and you know how to do it.

And if you don't, then the how isn't the hard part. In today's age of YouTube and Google, the how is never the hard part. If you don't know how to do something, you go and you Google it and you find out. The hard part is the emotional capacity to actually implement the thing, because to do that, you need to take in the information and then think about it and feel it and act from that new place with the new knowledge and new perspective. If you change your perspective, then things change.

If you're at a place where you're always so uncomfortable and trying to hold on because you don't know how to emotionally regulate, like all those anxieties I had, then you're never really going to implement what you know. You'll just keep waiting and convincing yourself that you don't know how yet because it's so much easier just to admit that you don't know how than to admit that you're scared.

Now, on the other hand, if you genuinely don't know how, go and learn. Go to the library. Go to Google. Type in how to do the thing and follow the instructions. And then go and implement. When I first moved to Seattle, I wanted friends more than anything else. And until I started to find my own internal connection to myself, friends were hard.

All the external connection stuff-- connecting with friends, connecting with people, making relationships, not feeling so alone-- is more about connecting with yourself first, because you can have a ton of people surrounding you, let's say in a room of 100 people, and you can still feel alone because you aren't able to feel the connection to those other people, literally. If you're saying that feelings are bad, you'll reject the feeling of feeling connected to other people. And then you'll think, I still don't feel like I have friends, I still feel alone, Even though you may be in a community of thousands of people. Whereas if you're connected to yourself, it's very easy to go out and meet people and say hi.

Dealing with stress at home. Starting in middle school, about when I was diagnosed with Asperger's, I started to get really stressed out once I got home from school. It became a problem for my parents to get me to do homework while at the same time honoring my need to unwind and have that decompression time.

What they ended up doing and what has worked really well ever since was following this after school slash work schedule that we created through trial and error. Here it is. The biggest thing that makes this schedule work is the understanding that people do the best they can with the emotional capacity they have. So if you want to do better, you need more emotional capacity. That's why this schedule starts with one hour of non-electronic decompression time. It allows you to unwind without getting subjected to the endless draw of the internet.

Many people that we talk to on a daily basis don't understand the difference between recreational time and relaxation time. Both are good. Both are necessary. Confusing one for the other leads to what I call the Tylenol problem. See, when you take Tylenol, it doesn't really make the source of your pain go away. What it mostly does is remove your ability to measure if you are in pain or not. The source of the pain is still there. But under the influence of Tylenol, it is very easy to forget that you haven't resolved the issue because it feels like you have.

The same thing happens when you get on YouTube or Netflix on your phone. It feels like your stresses are melting away. But in reality, you're just being distracted from them. Your nervous system is still working overtime due to stress, and it needs that decompression time to calm down.

Think of it like a bottle of soda. If you shake it and throw it around, a lot of bubbles are produced. Once that happens, there are two ways to calm down the bottle of soda. You can either let it rest for a while, or you can open the top and let it explode all over you.

So when you are doing this non-electronic relaxation and decompression time, the focus is on not giving your nervous system new things to worry about and new things to emotionally process. Give it time for your bubbles to calm down, lest you burst. That could be going on a walk, reading a book-- my personal favorite-- doing LEGO or some other project, meditating, or staring at the sky.

The trick is to just make sure that you aren't giving your nervous system more to do. You've had a hard day. Give it a break. However, there's a big problem that a lot of people with Asperger's face-- relaxing is very uncomfortable to them.

If we define comfort not as the warm, fluffy pillow but just as what you're used to and what you know, then it makes sense that the definition of discomfort is what you don't know. If you aren't used to being relaxed, you don't know it. And therefore, it makes you uncomfortable, which makes you stressed. So the trick is to just start small. Do a small bit of relaxation, get used to it, and then do some more. If this becomes stressful, then you're doing too much at one time. Take it slow.

So how do you actually do the relaxing? Well, we're about to discuss a few different ways to relax, recharge, and do self-care. But before we do, it's really important that you understand this-- you don't need to do every technique mentioned here. If something isn't working out for you, don't force it. Just choose a different technique. With that being said, let's get started.

The easiest way to relax, in my opinion, is meditation. There are many forms of meditation, but my favorite is gratitude. Close your eyes and think about five things you're grateful for and why. That's it. Science has found that the more gratitude you have, the better your immune system works, the better your nervous system works, and the more resilient you.

There are many other forms of meditation, such as traditional sitting meditation, a walking meditation, and a seemingly infinite number of guided meditations that you can find on YouTube and through various apps on your phone. Again, if you find that a certain meditation technique doesn't work for you, don't do it. The whole idea here is to do more of what works for you, less of what doesn't, and try new things to see if they work.

Breathing exercises can also be a great way to relax. If I am really stressed, sometimes I just stop for a few moments and focus on a slow, steady exhale, like I'm blowing out of a straw. I found that to be incredibly relaxing, and it only takes about 30 seconds to a minute for me to achieve the effect.

Once you've done the non-electronic relaxation and decompression time, then it's time to go be productive-- do your homework, if you're still in an educational institution, catch up on chores, or be productive in some other way. You'll find that, oddly enough, being productive in this way is almost effortless. Why? Because you've given yourself a chance to recharge, and now your body and mind are ready to participate in the world again.

Now, what happens if there is no after school or after work for you, if you are between jobs or just wondering what to do in life and sitting on your computer a bit too much, waiting for the stress to go down or something to change so that you can finally interact with the world? If that is the case, I'd start by doing the non-electronic decompression time right when you wake up. Be serious about it. I've found that on the days where I take care of myself as soon as I wake up, I get more done before 11:00 AM than the days when I wake up and immediately check my phone.

The ultimate source of truth on this, however, is your own experiences and experiments. So try this out for three days. See how it works for you. Take note of how you feel before and after. Try some of the exercises that come later in this book and follow this golden rule-- do more of what works, less of what doesn't, and try new things to see if they work.

When my parents and I were first implementing this schedule, a typical day for me would be getting home and having that one hour of non-electronic decompression time where I'd literally just read a book, sometimes in the bathroom. OK, most of the time, I hid in the bathroom and read. Then I would go and do my homework. And once my homework was done, then I would go have fun.

Now, a key tip here is to get your homework or whatever chore you have to do done before fun because it's really, really hard to transition the other way. In today's world, video games and the internet are optimized to take as much attention of yours as possible and keep you doing that activity for as long as possible, which means, while they are fun, it is also measurably harder to switch gears and tear your attention away from video games than it is from, say, raking leaves.