When a panic attack strikes at night ...
Everyone has experienced them once before - panic attacks at night that make you tremble out of your sleep, shivering and sweaty. In the dream, horrible things seem to have happened, against which those affected by the nocturnal panic attack could save themselves only by waking up.
Learn here why anxiety is usually not threatening at night, that causes panic attacks in our daily lives and can be understood as a help to the human psyche.
What is it really about?
Loss of control and reorganization
Why panic attack at night? They stand for the state of emergency. The human body is on high alert. Everyone knows from experience how such a moment feels like. Something has happened that has thrown the normal rhythm of life from one moment to the other completely off track.
Fear is spreading, unable to handle this new situation. Maybe we can not change the circumstances because people left us or we lost our job.
Maybe a situation has arisen in which we should do something that seems impossible to us. In minutes, which we consciously can not control in the usual way, panic spreads. Another word is existential fear.
Although it is understandable that we do not die on death of a loved one ourselves, nevertheless we cease at that moment to exist in a previous way. We are no longer spouse, daughter, son, brother or sister. A relative dies and we stay behind. Part of our previous identity ceases to exist. That causes fears.
The entire psychic structure needs to rearrange. Exactly this time span is experienced as confusing. It makes you uncertain, because we are no longer what we were. But we still do not know who we will be after this loss.
The physical body remains the same, but our previous personality structure is broken at one point and needs to reorient itself.
Fears of change
This process of inner change is associated with strong feelings that manifest themselves in a nocturnal panic attack. Until the time of the new orientation, we experience helplessness, fear, confusion and resistance to the new situation.
Since nobody teaches us that even everyday life means constant change, we are afraid of upheaval. Change means dying. Something familiar and familiar leaves our everyday life.
This can happen through the loss of people, but it also happens with apparent trifles. If a cat gives birth to a baby, the beginning of new life is the end or the death of the pregnancy. Leaving the house in the morning to go to work also has to do with change and death in the broadest sense.
In your personality structure is the ability to be a person who lives at home. At the same time you have the opportunity to be a working person. Both expressions require different actions, thoughts and feelings. You switch between these expressions as a human being by choosing to do so.