My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How a Panic Attack Taught Me to Listen to My Body
By Kai, 32 — Portland, OR
I spent most of my twenties ignoring my body. Not in a dramatic way — I ate, I slept, I went to the gym when guilt pushed me there. But listening to my body? Actually paying attention to what it was trying to say? That wasn’t something I knew how to do. I was a data analyst. I lived in spreadsheets and dashboards. My body was just the thing that carried my brain to work.
Then one evening last March, standing in the checkout line at the grocery store with nothing more stressful than a basket of frozen dinners, my heart started hammering. My vision narrowed. My hands went numb. I left the basket on the floor and sat on the curb outside for twenty minutes, convinced I was dying. I wasn’t dying. I was having my first panic attack at thirty-one years old, and my body had been trying to warn me for months. I just hadn’t been listening.
When Anxiety Lives in Your Body, Not Your Mind
Here’s what nobody told me about anxiety: it doesn’t always start with worried thoughts. Sometimes it starts in your jaw. Sometimes it’s the way your shoulders creep toward your ears during a meeting. Sometimes it’s the fact that you haven’t taken a full breath — a real, belly-expanding breath — in so long that you’ve forgotten what one feels like.
After the grocery store incident, my doctor ran every test. Heart was fine. Blood work was fine. She said the word “anxiety” and I almost laughed. I wasn’t anxious. I was busy. There’s a difference, I told her. She looked at me the way doctors look at you when you’re wrong but they’re too kind to say so.
She referred me to a therapist who specialized in somatic work — the kind of therapy that pays attention to where emotions live in the physical body. I thought it sounded like nonsense. I went anyway, mostly because I was terrified of having another panic attack in public.
The first session, my therapist asked me to close my eyes and tell her what I noticed in my body. I sat there for a long time. “Nothing,” I said. She nodded like that was exactly the answer she expected.
Learning to Feel What I’d Been Numbing
It turns out that “nothing” was the problem. I had gotten so good at overriding my body’s signals — pushing through exhaustion, eating lunch at my desk without tasting it, holding tension in my neck for so long it became my neutral — that I had essentially gone numb from the neck down. My therapist called it disconnection. I called it being productive.
She gave me homework that felt almost embarrassingly simple. Three times a day, I was supposed to stop what I was doing, put my hand on my chest, and ask myself: What do I feel right now? Not emotionally. Physically. What is happening in my body at this exact moment?
The first week, I kept forgetting. The second week, I set alarms. The third week, I started noticing things I wished I hadn’t. The permanent knot between my shoulder blades. The way my stomach clenched every time my boss sent a Slack message. The shallow, almost panicky breathing that I’d apparently been doing all day, every day, for years.
It was like someone had turned the volume up on a radio I’d muted a decade ago, and all the static was pouring through.
The Night I Stopped Running From My Own Skin
About two months into therapy, I had a night where everything caught up with me. A brutal week at work. A fight with my partner about something small that was actually about something big. I could feel the familiar tightness building in my chest — the same tightness that had preceded the panic attack in the grocery store. My old instinct was to push through it. Open the laptop. Pour a drink. Find something to distract myself with until the feeling went away on its own.
Instead, I did something my therapist had been gently nudging me toward for weeks. I turned off my phone. I ran a bath — not a performative self-care bath with candles and a face mask, but a plain, hot bath with the lights off. And I just sat there. Breathing. Feeling the water against my skin. Noticing.
My jaw was clenched so tight it ached when I finally let it go. My hands had been balled into fists without me realizing. When I consciously relaxed each part of my body, one section at a time, I started to cry. Not dramatically. Just quietly, in the dark, like something was finally being allowed to leave.
Afterward, still in that strange, soft state, I reached for a small wellness device I’d bought weeks earlier on a whim and never used. I didn’t have expectations. I just wanted to stay in my body instead of retreating back into my head. The sensation was gentle — almost startlingly so. It reminded me that my body could feel things other than tension. Other than dread. That pleasure was still in there, underneath all the static. I had just stopped giving it room.
I lay in bed afterward and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had done something purely because my body wanted it — not because a calendar told me to, not because someone else needed me to, but because I felt a want and followed it. Rachel, a woman in my somatic therapy group, once said that doing something for her own body felt radical after years of putting everyone else first. I finally understood what she meant.
What Somatic Awareness Actually Looks Like Day to Day
I want to be honest about this: learning to listen to my body didn’t cure my anxiety. I still have hard days. I still catch myself holding my breath during tense meetings. The difference is that now I notice. And noticing — that tiny gap between the sensation and my reaction to it — has changed everything.
My toolkit is simple and unsexy. I do a body scan every morning before I look at my phone. It takes four minutes. I notice where I’m holding tension and I breathe into it. I’ve started walking without headphones twice a week, which sounds like nothing but feels enormous when your default is constant input. I pay attention to what my body is asking for — rest, movement, warmth, quiet, touch — and I try to respond before it has to scream.
Some nights, that response is a long stretch on the floor. Some nights, it’s going to bed at eight-thirty without guilt. Some nights, it’s reaching for that device again in the dark, not as a fix but as a conversation. A way of saying: I’m here. I’m paying attention. You don’t have to shout.
My therapist told me something early on that I think about almost daily. She said the panic attack wasn’t a malfunction. It was a message. My body had been sending smaller messages for years — the tight jaw, the shallow breathing, the knot in my stomach — and I had ignored every single one. The panic attack was my body raising its voice because nothing else had worked.
My body didn’t give up on me. It just got louder. And once I learned that, I couldn’t un-learn it.
How Listening to My Body Changed My Whole Life
It’s been about a year now. I’m not a different person, but I’m a more honest one. I left a job that was slowly grinding me into dust — not in a cinematic “I quit” moment, but in a quiet conversation with my manager about a transition plan. I started cooking again, not meal-prepping efficiently but actually cooking, with my hands in things, tasting as I go. I sleep better. I argue less, mostly because I can feel when I’m escalating before words come out.
My partner noticed before I did. He said I seem less far away. I didn’t know I’d been far away, but I think he was right. I’d been living about six inches behind my own eyes, watching my life through a screen, and somewhere in the last year I climbed back into my actual body. It’s messier in here. Louder. More uncomfortable sometimes. But it’s real, and I’d rather feel all of it than none of it.
If you’re someone who lives in your head — who has gotten so good at ignoring your body that you’ve forgotten it has things to say — I’m not going to tell you to meditate or buy a journal or practice gratitude. I’m going to tell you something simpler. Right now, wherever you are, put your hand on your chest. Close your eyes. And ask yourself, honestly: What do I feel?
You might be surprised by the answer. I was.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone and The 10-Minute Bedtime Ritual for Better Sleep. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
