My Ridiculous Panic Attack Strategy
- Hattie Blyth
- Nov 8, 2018
- 4 min read
I keep trying to explain this to people and they think it's the worst coping mechanism I could possibly come up with. During a panic attack, I quite often watch a horror film and I would whole heartedly recommend this to anyone feeling anxious or panicked. It sounds insane but hear me out.
My first panic attack was one of the most traumatic experiences I've ever had. I was lying in bed hungover when I started to feel a twinge in my chest. A twinge turned into a sort of crunching and pounding feeling, then I had pains through my whole body, then I couldn't feel one side of my body, and then my vision became pretty gnarly. I went to A & E because I was convinced I was dying. Once they had done tests and they told me it was a panic attack, I felt a bit of a tit for wasting NHS time, but you live and learn.
Since then, I have had panic attacks very regularly. At points, I will have them a few times a day and they come out of nowhere. I don't know whether I'm alone in this, but I find it so hard to do things like regulate breathing, remember strategies and practice meditation when I'm convinced I'm in my dying moments and I'm lamenting the fact that I never got to see Madonna live, so I've found distraction to be the best technique. I'm working on being able to deploy different techniques during a panic attack and if anyone has any tips I'd love to hear them, but sometimes the ones I know aren't possible. When I wake up in the middle of the night because of a panic attack, I can't go for a walk or go to the gym, so I tend to stick on a horror film or series.
Generally speaking, I have two approaches to horror. It either has to be 75% or above, or 15% or below on Rotten Tomatoes for me to love it. Shit horror is one of my favourite things, and the Holy Grail of shit horror, for me, is the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man. I could watch it every day. A good quarter of the film is Nicolas Cage falling under/through/into things, and at one point he points a gun at a woman on a push bike and shouts “Ma'am, step away from the bicycle.” This is the hill I am more than happy to die on- The Wicker Man is the Beyonce of bad horror.
In terms of the bracket of horror movies and series I would consider to be of a higher calibre than 2006's The Wicker Man, some of my favourites are The Shining, Get Out, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises and The Omen. More recently, A Quiet Place absolutely blew me away. Krasinski's world building and characters, even in a not-silent-but-silent film, were incredible. Ghost Stories is another recent favourite of mine. It reminded me a lot of Inside No 9. Also, last week I watched The Haunting of Hill House and it was pretty great. I liked how they humanised addiction, made me totally adore a couple of the characters and rounded off the series with an unexpectedly heartbreaking final episode. I like Easter eggs, and I'm looking forward to going back to the series to spot the hidden ghosts.
When I am in pain, scared and at a loss of what to do to help myself, horror movies offer an immediate respite for me because putting on one of the Saw movies and watching someone have to cut off their own arm makes me think “well, it could be worse.” Taking myself out of my own problems and placing myself into someone else's (fictional and hyperbolic) problems, I think, works for a few reasons.
For one, I tend to pick visually immersive horror films. This can mean that the >75% or <15% rule often goes out the window when I pick a horror films during a panic attack. Choosing something with a lot of gore (like Saw, Hostel or Halloween) or immersive and striking cinematography (like The Shining, Dracula, Stranger Things or Insidious.) It doesn't have to be particularly good in terms of story, it just has to take me somewhere else.
Second, I need it to be pretty stressful. Hear me out on this one. Being stressed out over something fictional is way better than being stressed out by a panic attack. I pick something bloody or immersive because these are things that are far detached from my world, and being drawn into something unfamiliar means that I never take that stress into the rest of my life. I'm not particularly worried about being captured by Jigsaw, hounded by my apparently immortal and murderous big brother, having a possessed child or a pointy fingered bastard chasing me in my dreams. Those things aren't going to happen, but it's a welcome distraction to enter those worlds temporarily, enjoy a few harmless scares and then go back to reality.
Waiting for a jump scare is a very short physical endurance. Sometimes you hold your breath, tense your shoulders, wait for something to pop out at you. Being forced into a slightly different physically scared state- and one which comes with the adrenaline of the wake of the jump scare- has a much more satisfying pay off than a panic attack. A horror film can force that for me, and it make me forget about my panic attack.
By the time the movie is over, I've been constantly thinking about a fictional problem for probably an hour and a half. I've subconsciously been put in a different physical and emotional state, and it's an almost immediate release. This won't work for everyone, but I've included a couple of links to articles I found about watching horror films during a panic attack, so I'm definitely not alone in this. Don't be made to feel like a freak if you find comfort in horror movies, because me and at least two journalists are right there with you.
Comments