Personal Narrative: My Personal Experience With Anxiety And Panic Attacks

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In 2010 I started having issues with anxiety and panic attacks. At the time I worked as an account manager and salesperson, and I had started to absolutely hate it. In addition to not liking my job at all, the company I worked for was having financial trouble, looked like it was going to go out of business, and was generally just a bad place to work. Whenever I would start to feel like I had too much on my plate or that something wasn’t going right, I would begin to feel anxious about it and eventually started having panic attacks to the point where I would sometimes have to leave for the day.
This went on for a few months before my wife finally convinced me to talk to someone about it. I started talking to a therapist and we figured out that
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I was stuck in a job I hated and did not know where I was going with it. I also wanted to transition to IT work but did not have the education for it. The job did not pay that well so I was living paycheck to paycheck and things were so unstable at the company that every day was difficult to get through. I eventually moved to IT and was making more money, but the work environment was still pretty toxic. All of these things contributed to a decline in my mental health to the point where I had to take medicine for anxiety for a …show more content…
Well-being has five measurable elements (PERMA) that count toward it: Positive emotion (Of which happiness and life satisfaction are all aspects), Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and purpose, Accomplishment.”
I think this definition works well because it contains the indicators of well-being within it. I think that the indicators are at a high level and that it does take some interpretation to apply them to your own life. For example, positive emotion easily makes sense but the relationships indicator might mean different things to different people. One might be the type of person that gets a sense of well-being from having many friends or maybe just from a couple of very close ones.
With a little bit of interpretation, I can apply these indicators to my personal experience of dealing with anxiety and panic attacks. During this time there was a lack of positive emotion. I did not feel satisfied with any aspect of my work life and going to work on a daily basis was a huge negative experience. Engagement was lacking as well because I was not happy with my job or where I was going with my career. Relationships were probably the one place during this time where I did feel fulfilled because I had my wife and friends at work who were doing what they could to help me deal with