Start writing them down
Memory rewrites attacks within hours. A record kept at the time is the only accurate account you’ll get, and every later unit reads from it.
One instruction for the rest of this unit, and it isn’t to change anything.
Write down each attack, as soon after it as you can. The guidance is specific about the timing — the form is ‘to be completed as soon after each panic attack as possible’5 — and the reason is that memory does not store these accurately. Within hours an attack compresses into it was awful and it came from nowhere, which is vaguer, worse, and more frightening than what actually happened.
The record asks for what the standard form asks for: when it started, what was happening beforehand, whether it came out of the blue, the worst it got on a 0–10, which sensations were there, what went through your mind, and what you did.5
Two of those fields do more work than they look like.
‘What was happening just before’ — because most people arrive certain that their attacks are random, and a fortnight of records usually says otherwise. Not always: sometimes the trigger really was below noticing, which Lesson 4 covers. But often a pattern turns up that nobody could have recalled without writing it down.
‘What did you do’ — this is the one Unit 2 needs most, and it is the easiest to leave blank because the answers feel too small to record. Left. Sat down. Held onto the rail. Checked my pulse. Texted someone. Those aren’t trivia; they’re the subject of five lessons, and they’re much harder to reconstruct later than the fear was.
Nothing here is scored. There’s no total, no severity band, no chart of whether you’re improving. This program has no questionnaire at all, and it doesn’t need one. What the record is for is evidence, and it’s evidence you’ll be reading yourself.
There’s also a two-question end-of-day check, and the second question is the one worth watching: how much of today went on worrying about having an attack. For a lot of people that number is the real size of the problem — the attacks take minutes, the anticipation takes the week.
Do this for a week or two before Unit 2. The next unit works on what you’ve written, and there isn’t much to work with after two entries.
