Panic and Prayer
How many licks does it take to get to the center of the post-modern Tootsie Pop?
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“My therapist told me to eat a WARHEAD whenever I’m feeling a panic attack coming on … and when I say I have never had anything rip me out of the throes of a f***ing panic attack faster, I f***ing mean it.”
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Since this creator posted her viral TikTok video last November, doctors and mental health professionals have weighed in across the internet regarding the “WARHEAD Method” for aborting panic attacks, affirming that the intense sensation of sourness can act as a “grounding” mechanism—something that distracts the brain from negative thoughts and emotions enough to stave off a moment of acute anxiety or panic.1 Panic attacks, after all, are (simply) triggered by an overactive amygdala. The brain is triggered into a fight-or-flight response, causing a cascade of physical symptoms that scream “get the hell out of here”: a racing heart, chills and sweating, dizziness, even chest pain and numbness. The way out of them, psychologists agree, is to escape the vicious cycle of negative thoughts and fear that characterizes them, primarily through distraction: focus on your breath, touch something soft, focus on a nearby object, get up and walk. In other words, to get out of your head, you need to get into your body.
I have experienced the occasional (and at times, more-than-occasional) bout of anxiety, and while I haven’t tried the WARHEAD Method, I imagine it could work beautifully in some cases to bring a person reeling in the zero-gravity hysteria of abstracted panic back down to earth, if even for a moment.
But, I wonder, just how many WARHEADS does it take to bring healing to the deeper parts of us, to those aspects of our psyche that have been so untethered from a sense of reality, stability, purpose, that they have been flung out of orbit? How many licks does it take to get to the center of the post-modern Tootsie Pop? For in a milieu that tends to yank us endlessly away from embodied experience and into the metaverse of online avatars and the two-dimensional, 3-by-6-inch versions of other peoples’ lives, not to mention the many mundane tasks now mediated to us by screens (grocery shopping, exercise, scheduling appointments, even reading and writing), connaturality with our own physical existence—a.k.a. our bodies and the bodies of others—tends to erode over time. This, for the human person, created as a body-soul unity, is by definition a disorder of the first degree. It amounts to an alienation from oneself, a forgetting of one’s own identity akin to what
and in their recent essay, “Building People with Three-Dimensional Memory,” called “digital Alzheimer’s disease.” Peco writes,As real Alzheimer’s progresses, there is not only memory loss, but disorientation, anxiety, depression, aggressive behavior, and delusional thinking. Perhaps when the memory loss of a society becomes great enough, we see something similar. We might find ourselves wondering, Why do so many people suddenly have such strange ideas? Why are they so afraid? Or so angry?
When we start to lose our grip on the larger whole of life, we can only cling to the fragments. Usually the emotionally powerful bits. And we will tend to cling to these bits with pathological fixity, as deep down we know that we aren’t on secure ground …
If the “digital Alzheimer’s disease” thesis is correct, then how can we fail to draw at least some connection between the rise of “digital natives” and the increasing prevalence of self-reported anxiety and panic disorder among those who inhabit virtual spaces for large portions of the day? This is more than mere speculation; to name just one important alarm-ringer, Jon Haidt has written convincingly and at length, both in his recent book The Anxious Generation, and at his Substack,
, about the evidence supporting this connection. The jury is in: to the extent that our lives are lived online, that is, detached from the intrinsic embodiedness of those things which actually make human beings happy—companionship, conversation, laughter, food, exercise, sex, a warm summer breeze—we put ourselves at serious risk of mental illness, for the mind does not bob in a vat, aloof from the body and its needs and desires, but inhabits the body and only through the body is put in vital contact with reality.2Anxious? Touch some grass. Drop and give me 10. Eat a Warhead. Escape the prison of imagined reality and be where your feet are.
Better still would be to recognize that not only are you an embodied creature, inextricably endowed with skin and blood vessels and taste buds and neurons; you are the imago Dei, a living icon of the One who is not one, but three—the God whose innermost secret is that he is “an eternal exchange of love.”3 Embodiedness, in other words, is not for sense perception alone, for you are not a mere beast. For you, made in God’s likeness, the body is (somewhat paradoxically) the vessel that carries you out of yourself and towards the other. By way of the body we speak, listen, exchange glances and touches and kisses, offer our presence. In a virtual world, relationships are depressingly unreal, mediated to us by devices that, for all the amazing innovation they represent (and no matter how believable their imitations of “intelligence”), remain no more than the work of men’s hands:
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
Those who make them are like them;
so are all who trust in them.4
The human person cannot bear to be confined to “relationship” with cameras and microphones and speakers and touchscreens—even if these are accompanied with the sounds and images of the real people we love, they will not satisfy the thirst for real presence; especially when the vast majority of faces and voices we encounter through our devices are those of strangers, “influencers” who come disguised as friends but who continually urge us to like, subscribe, and most importantly, buy. Increasingly social media, originally designed to create online networks amongst people who presumably have incarnated experiences of one another, has mutated into an ever-shifting smokescreen of familiar faces attached to people otherwise completely unknown to us, play-acting conversations with their anonymous hoard of subscribers, curating moments to fit their aesthetic so you and I might consider, if even for a moment, that our lives would be better if we just had that top, those earrings, that water bottle, that color paint on our walls (links down below!) When at last we wrench our exhausted eyeballs away from the screen, having been thoroughly influenced, we emerge as if from Plato’s cave, tortured by the brilliance of mundane reality, unable to bask in its sweet glow, having become acclimated only to the glare of blue light. The spell is broken. It is too much, or not enough, or maybe a bit of both. Reality is a potion too strong for us—we panic, and recede back into the numb comfort of the feed, and in the event that we cannot escape the normal events of everyday life, we grab a Warhead to mitigate their acutest effects.
At this point I dare to suggest that the strongest remedy for this reality-induced panic is not sour candy but prayer. Not because prayer will take away the difficulties in your life; it most assuredly won’t. Not even because if you pray, God will heal your anxiety; he might, and he might not. The Prosperity Gospel takes many forms in today’s culture, and I refuse to lend my voice to its distortions. No, prayer won’t fix what’s wrong. But it also does happen to be the only thing capable of giving you what you really want—yes, that thing you want so bad that it hurts, hurts so bad that you try to smother it with noise and stimulation and comfort. Might I hazard a guess that that thing is not money, romance, beauty, or fame, but rather the faithful presence of someone who loves you? Presence, no matter what suffering comes your way? Presence, no matter what petty acts of selfishness you commit? Presence, no matter how damn unremarkable you and your little life actually are when you set down your phone and drop all the false pretense?
“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."5 What can the invitation of Christ mean for us today unless it is rest from the desperate search for a love that lasts in a culture dominated by “content creators” in search of “subscribers”? Who is heavy laden if not the person oppressed by the yoke of the practical atheism begotten by this vast, virtual throwaway culture—who thus believes that the meaning of his life is something he must conjure up for himself, and who yet knows in the hidden recesses of his soul that no meaning can ever be found there. No wonder if he should have the occasional panic attack; this is a burden no mortal was meant to bear.
Prayer, on the other hand, begins with the recognition that there exists a love that has pursued us through the years—that we have been drawn by many tethers deeper and deeper into the mystery of God’s desire for friendship with us, and that there is no escaping him apart from the annihilation of our very selves. Without this awareness we cannot proceed; it is at the core of the Christian claim. Once awakened to it, however, the heart is moved spontaneously to the desire simply for God’s presence, for nearness to him, as we read in the Psalms:
How lovely is your dwelling place,
Lord Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God …Better is one day in your courts
than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of the wicked.6
It is here, in the “dwelling place” of God, that the heart can rest—or, if you like, pray. For many of us say prayers; but how rare is the experience of quiet attention the saints so often speak of when they talk of prayer. John Henry Newman likened it to the habit of the loyal household dog curled up at his master’s feet, content to be close by, not awaiting or anticipating anything in particular. John Vianney, when asked what he did during his time of prayer, said simply, “I look at him, and he looks at me.” Therese of Lisieux described prayer as “a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.” These are not pious platitudes; they are the sentiments of people who have unburdened their souls in the secret of a secure love.
This leads to a fair question: going back to the beginning of our discussion, if the key to overcoming anxiety is to get out of your head and into your body, how can prayer be any help? Isn’t prayer about as “in your head” as it gets? Here it is crucial to remember that for Christians (perhaps especially for Catholics), the love of God is never something abstract or merely “spiritual.” It is glimpsed most clearly on every crucifix: there we behold the God who emptied himself of glory to take on human nature, the man who walked among us, ate and drank with sinners, knew hunger and fatigue and sorrow, and who finally delivered up his own body for our ransom on the Cross, the Savior who not only rescued us from the powers of sin and death but also established a visible Body, the Church, into which we can all be incorporated through baptism, a human society that embodies Jesus and his mission as a Sacrament to the world—and finally, the lover who was not content to make his dwelling with us during his earthly life only, but now remains with us in every tabernacle, every monstrance, every consecrated host throughout the world, so that we might never be deprived of the chance to see him, touch him, taste him. The heart of the Gospel is that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”7 For a world stricken with loneliness, isolation, and anxiety, the Good News is not just “God loves you,” but “God is with you.”
So pray. And no, I’m not saying that you can “pray the panic away,” though you can get nonsense like that from plenty of others. Pray because unlike Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, where all relationships are contrived and artificial and all promise of human connection is a mirage, prayer is presence—your presence to God, and his presence to you. Isolation breeds fear and anxiety, for you were not made to be alone. But look up: he is with you, yesterday, today, and forever.
More from Recovering Catholic:
See, for example, Utah State University, “Ask an Expert—Sour Power: Can Candy Help Stave Off Panic and Anxiety Attacks?”; Charles Trepany, “If you’re having a panic attack, TikTokers say this candy may cure it. Experts actually Agree.” USA Today.
On this point, I recommend Dr. Christopher Thompson’s excellent book on nature, Pope Francis’ concept of ecological conversion, and Thomistic psychology, The Joyful Mystery: Field Notes Toward a Green Thomism.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 221.
Psalm 115:4-8.
Matthew 11:28
Psalm 84: 1-2, 10
John 1:14
The progression you made from embodiment to prayer to Eucharistic Presence & sacrifice was masterful and insightful. Thank you for writing this, Sarah!
*stands and slow claps* As a therapist, this is something I’m thinking about and talking about with my clients on a regular basis. I don’t know a single person who isn’t longing for exactly that. More presence. More peace.