I used to experience a lot of panic. A lot of panic. I was having panic attacks almost daily. I could barely attend classes – I felt like I was dying: heart beating super fast, hyperventilating, constantly checking my fit-bit to make sure I still had a pulse. It almost ruined me that semester. And then, one day, in what felt like a sudden shift, I got words for it. I began to cluster my experience. I began to start looking at it instead of being subsumed by it.
Now I could say things like “I’m having a panic attack right now.” And somehow, being able to say that to myself works. It is still surprising to me how well it works. I haven’t had a panic attack since (it’s been ~3 years). I still get the symptoms sometimes, but when they’re there I just notice them for what they are and it subsides. How the hell does that work?!? Why is it so powerful?
I think it’s a couple of things. Words implicitly come with an aboutness to them – they are descriptors of the world – things we use to talk about what is going on, rather than being directly in it. The very act of using words already presupposes some up and awayness.
And also, words compress and abstract – they take this phenomenon of panic, this hugely multidimensional, vast, throbbing, spiraling, bumbling mess of confusion, and they turn it into one thing: “panic.” Panic acts as a low-dimensional stand-in for this correlated set of things, and having a lower dimensional handle begets more mental space and clarity. Now instead of drowning in the tumultuous sea of my mind, I see that this one thing, “panic,” is happening and other parts of my mind have the room to come online and be like “yeah, that’s happening, and it’s gonna be okay.” Before it was just panic. Now, with words, with that abstraction, it is panic and other corners of my mind.
This is really special, I think. I think it’s hard to do this without words – this sort of on the fly abstraction and sensemaking. There are of course other kinds of sensemaking that are very valuable and can be done without words – the type of wisps-at-the-corners-of-the-mind thinking is great! High-dimensional experience, the texture of reality, all of these things are beautiful and I love them. But words have a power, too. A bit magical, really.
Words offer this affordance – to say “this part of reality, I think there’s something there to be organized and abstracted.” And you can meditate your mind there, and sensemaking occurs, as your mind wraps around those experiences, trying to tie them to this landmark you’ve just placed, a stand in for something that will eventually become a coherent whole.
For instance, I am currently trying to find words for a much more pernicious and subtle mental phenomena that is happening in me right now. It’s a vast, complex landscape undoubtedly related to past trauma. And it happens all of a sudden and I’m in it – completely subject to it. I think if I had the right words, something analogous to “I’m experiencing panic,” I’d have a much better handle on it. So I’m looking for the right words, sort of like Focusing. “I feel worthless” and see if it takes. The worthlessness one is working for me right now and actually now that I’m writing this I realize that often in Focusing when you get the “right word” things shift in your body, and I’ve noticed that here. I’ve noticed that saying “I’m feeling worthless” feels like it gets at the root of the thing.
But there’s more work to do – having the word is helpful, it gives me a landmark to cluster experience around. Okay, I’m feeling worthless, what are the types of emotions and thoughts I have around this word? Vague feelings of “the world seems strange and scary,” getting more agitated by little things, loss of taste, loss of vibrancy, a bit dull, and so on… There is a lot there, it doesn’t seem to be as tightly correlated and concise and bounded as panic (which happens suddenly and is usually very similar across instances). But it’s a start, to have this word for this web of experiences and to slowly hook up what that word means to me.
Because once you have the word, once you understand, once you have the affordance to look at it rather than being in it, you’re above it. You’re now able to have a you there that can look on with care and most of the work is done. But getting that right – finding words, figuring out that mapping from experience to the handle, it’s important.
There are a lot of really cool findings about the interaction of language and cognition. I’ll just mention one here. If you watch the gaze patterns of people from different languages analyzing a scene they will attend to different aspects of it only when asked to offer a verbal description of it later, not when they are simply asked to watch. And of course there are the findings about people not being able to distinguish colors which aren’t labeled in their language (this has some complications but is basically true).
Language causes us to look at the world differently, it affects our attentional landscape and what we let in. So of course using words to try to describe our internal experience will affect how we relate to it, how we organize our mind around it. Words offer clarity, a way to go up and away, to take as object, to organize experience in coherent ways. Noticing that there might be a word like “panic” to talk about mental events is setting up the abstraction process – the one wherein you can begin to associate the vast, bubbling sea of the tendrils in the mind to a handle. A handle which can then be used in other mental computations and which gives you space – space to see and to use the handle with the other parts of the mind.
Words are pretty magical, I think. Uncompressed experience is pretty magical, too. I think there’s a good balance to strike here – something that weaves in and out of the cognitive, one that helps clarify experience, enabling future experience to be better and richer and new. Maybe this is just Focusing, maybe I just described Focusing and why it seems to work, probably these things are very related. Oops. Regardless, words are great. Make some abstractions! Give yourself a boat and an anchor on the sea of the mind.