What Is The Opposite Of A Panic Attack?

Cultivating A Joy Beyond Reason

Can you simply sit, relax and enjoy yourself by yourself? 

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

How about without any of the usual suspects: whether that's a friend, a lover, some drug, food, or the countless forms of entertainment we have available to us?

If not, why not?

I'm willing to bet (not very much, mind you) that if you're like most, there is no shortage of reasons why you can't enjoy yourself.

Enter the negativity bias – a finding from psychology describing the tendency for humans to more readily experience negative emotion. Something about survival and threat detection, blah blah blah.

I find it profoundly hilarious that we made a discovery justifying our own propensity for misery.

Put another way, how could you enjoy yourself if you were alone in a room?

I'm in the midst of an online meditation retreat run by Jhourney, a start-up that offers data-driven meditation education and approaches the topic in an unexpectedly refreshing and cogent way.

I'll give you a hint -- it really is all contained in that opening question I posed.

So before we dive into what the opposite of a panic attack is, let's investigate the chosen metaphor. I choose it with some care, as I would not identify with having personally experienced either a panic attack or an anxiety attack, though I figure I’ve spent plenty of time wallowing in the throes of existential angst.

Cursory research indicates a distinction to be made between panic attacks and anxiety attacks. While panic attacks tend to be more autonomic, are quite intense physiologically and have both a sudden onset and short duration, anxiety attacks build more gradually, but can also be more chronic. 

What I’m alluding to is somewhere in between – in some ways it cannot be forced and comes unbidden (like a panic attack). This may even include the Buddha himself: in one account, he recollects a pleasant childhood memory during his sitting under the Bodhi tree. On the other hand, we can train for it to become more likely (like an anxiety attack).

While the valence is the exact opposite, if we formulate an anxiety attack as a positive feedback loop of negative emotion, let's turn our attention to what its opposite could be.

Joy Has A New Address

What would a positive feedback loop of positive emotion look like?

Now, maybe you're thinking of a figure like The Joker, the fictional maniacal psychopath villain that stands as the chaotic counterpoint to Batman's highly ordered, dour, precise and supernal expression of human potential.

It is interesting that we often associate an excess of positive emotion with madness or insanity, but that is the perhaps overlooked etymology of maniac – one who suffers from mania, apart from the colloquial and pejorative connotation of proclivity to recklessness.

Or maybe something like devolving into a paroxystic puddle of laughter. Sometimes I think one of my secrets to living well is having an extremely low threshold for laughter. On an aside, I really ought to consider offering laughter yoga workshops. Stay tuned (but don’t hold your breath).

Now, what you may not have expected is the serene and composed smirk of the Buddha. Or maybe you did, in which case, touché.

What is he smiling about, anyway?

I'll be honest -- just over a decade ago at my first silent meditation retreat, during some of my first exposure to Buddhist teachings, I was more than slightly repulsed -- philosophically, the whole Buddhist enterprise seemed rather dull and morose going on about suffering, death, old age and such, while depriving whatever paltry diversions life had to offer -- no music, no sex, no drugs, no reading, no talking.

Suffice to say, my views have changed over time as I’ve investigated further. I did not know then what I know now. I’m still recalcitrant to call myself a Buddhist per se, though I’m not sure how else such teachings could have been introduced to be more palatable. To paraphrase the Buddha, his teachings go against the grain of the world, so it is no surprise they are not particularly appealing to most.

On the other hand, there's Mathieu Ricard, a Nepalese French monk who gave a TED talk on happiness. Some pundits call him “the happiest man in the world,” though he himself scoffs at such an epithet.

So maybe there's something there?

Isn't it funny that even when it's basically common knowledge that renunciates are among the happiest of people in the world, how many are a) seriously considering ordination or b) actually follow through and become monks or nuns?

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s a huge line.

Now, the big reveal – what am I talking about with the “opposite of a panic attack” and what’s the big deal?

No Pleasure, No Treasure

Enter the jhanas.

They are a source of great confusion and dissent among different Buddhist traditions.

Some traditions say they are absolutely a prerequisite before enlightenment, being the last spoke of the Noble Eightfold Path – sama-samadhi.

Others say they are not necessary at all, and potentially a danger, or that they are an optional side quest, so to speak, on the road to liberation.

There are still other camps that say they are not forms of meditation at all, and that one can experience them while going about one’s life – that they are merely a by-product of virtue, attaining the Right View, and carrying on with the gradual training and walking along the preceding steps of the path.

Suffice to say that really doesn’t clear things up.

As religions calcify over centuries with dogma and tradition, there has historically been attempts to reinvigorate them with schools emphasizing mysticism and direct experience. For example, Gnosticism and Christianity, Sufism and Islam, and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. In some respects, I see the work of Jhourney in that light — reverse-engineering these so-called rarefied states of advanced meditation without being beholden to dogma. “We have the technology.”

What are they then? 

Perhaps this will do: the jhanas are states of altered perception characterized by increasingly subtle levels of positive emotion, clarity and well-being that become accessible through meditative training.

While pleasurable, it is claimed they are not addictive, as their pleasure isn’t derived from sensuality.

I’ll take that risk – it seems like there are other sources of pleasure that present far greater possibilities for harm.

I’ll keep you posted. So far, so good.