How Panic Attacks Led Me to Help Others Heal Through Movement

In July 2017, I started having panic attacks at work, several afternoons in a row. They came out of nowhere and were unlike anything I had felt before. I was breathless, nauseated and weak all at once, with the doom of imminent death looming over me. After the third day, when I was certain my heart was stopping, I rushed to the hospital for an EKG.

When they told me that it was “just anxiety,” the realization that my heart was fine was almost disappointing. Knowing that anxiety was the culprit told me nothing about how to stop feeling so terrible that I couldn’t bring myself to complete work tasks at all. At the time, I was on track for a major promotion and trying desperately to prove my value to a skeptical and unsupportive team. The timing couldn’t have been worse. 

Facing Facts: Something had to change

The journey that unfolded afterwards was long and meandering – in fact, it was the start of a chapter of self-discovery and reflection that eventually prompted me to leave a full time corporate career for good and carve out the “non-standard” professional path that I am on now.

It is because of this moment of absolute desperation and uncertainty that I was able to finally connect to my true purpose: helping people with persistent pain and chronic conditions find confidence and joy in moving their bodies without any shaming, judgment or “shoulds”. Anxiety, like pain, is information. And at that moment I was being told that my work environment didn’t fit me; it was toxic.

No matter how much I tried to shoehorn myself into the mold I was being told I needed to fill in order to prove myself as a leader, something needed to break. It was either going to be the mold, or me.

One of the really formative things I realized as part of this tumultuous period was that I had been chasing after other people’s definitions of success for my entire career. I had such a strong people pleasing streak in me that from the moment I got my first job, I leaned full tilt into seeking out the approval of everyone around me.

And the feeling of inadequacy never abated. I just kept striving for the next sign of worth no matter what company I was at or what industry I was in–from serving tables to fundraising to academic research to data analysis, it was all a race to be good enough. Management consulting in particular really fed that need in me.

Everything in consulting is about meeting the client’s demands and sanitising one’s personal characteristics to show up with the utmost poise and grace, regardless of what they throw at you. I polished my professionalism until I gleamed and I did well as a result. But I felt hollow inside. I kept telling myself I would finally feel successful after the next big step, but all that came was doubt.

A Turning Point: Finding my personal values

Fast forward 1 year from my epic panic attack week (all the excitement of shark week but with inner dread voice), and I had consumed every self-help book I could find. I was flailing as I desperately sought solid ground to stand on in my search for a sense of belonging.

I needed to make sense of what was happening to me because I felt so out of control. My first win came when a mindfulness teacher I was following recommended meditating on 5 personal values. When asked to write them down, I had to acknowledge that I didn’t know what my priorities actually were. I had been making decisions without any sense of my own needs and desires for, basically, my entire life. 

I had to start from the beginning, with an excavation of my heart to figure out what actually mattered to me. I often say that you know you’re a people pleaser when someone asks “what do you want?” and nothing but a blank page pops up in your mind. Well, that was me. So, I sat and reflected on a vision of myself at the end of my life, looking back and imagining what would be important to me in that moment:

• How would I gauge whether it had in fact been a life well-lived? 
• What experiences can I imagine looking back on with the most gratitude? 

When I wrote down the things that I believed would be the most important to me in my final hours, I had to face the fact that my daily life was not at all shaped around the things I professed to care about. And those things, in a nutshell, were: filling my brain with knowledge, experiencing other cultures, moving my body, helping people, and investing in meaningful relationships. 

In search of alignment

For years I had been certain that I wanted to be a Chief Operating Officer someday, but I realized this was just an arbitrary goal I had set because it felt like a career pinnacle and a title that was guaranteed to come with recognition and a sense of self-worth.

But if all the other promotions hadn’t given me that feeling, there was nothing to guarantee I would actually feel worthy with this one. I also knew that climbing to the C-suite in the toxic work culture where I was would mean trying to show up as someone I just wasn’t, which was something I had been doing for too long already. I started to see that my crippling anxiety–not to mention the chronic low back and hip pain I had since adolescence–was directly related to this conflict between who I was in my core and who the world around me kept telling me I should be.

I had to accept that I wasn’t going to align my life to my values overnight. I needed a plan to get there and it would require a whole lot of changes. I started meditating every day on my 5 personal values, saying them in my mind and visualizing myself living them out.

I started making small decisions that added up to big ones. One of these was deciding to complete the Balanced Body Comprehensive Pilates Certification. And this eventually led to the founding of my Pilates for pain studio Movement Remedies in 2022, which took a huge leap of faith having no idea how I would make rent at the time. But I believed in it.

The process of building a life around my values began more than 8 years ago and it has not been linear. There have been several moments of realizing that my old drive to feel accepted and validated by others had caused me to get distracted from my priorities. I found myself chasing after relationships that weren’t built on respect and trust.

I allowed my fear of failure to steer me toward some financially destructive and time-consuming decisions I later regretted. I let the needs of my business trump time with the people I love on many occasions. It’s not like these deeply ingrained habits disappear, we just learn to catch ourselves and redirect the focus back to what matters–with compassion. 

Bringing it back to our bodies

When people come to me seeking a movement program for their specific condition or pain symptom, they are usually surprised to learn that we start with a conversation about values. This is because the health and wellness industry–responsible for an estimated $500 billion in US consumer spending annually–has been systematically inserting its own values into the way you view and evaluate your body since before you were born.

We simply cannot have a productive conversation about movement without first addressing the shame and guilt that we carry around with us, along with all the “shoulds” that permeate marketing everywhere. There’s nothing more lucrative than making people feel terrible about themselves so that they can be sold the “miracle solution”. 

When I came up with the title for my book, You’re Meant to Move, I was thinking about the fact that so many people believe that a regular movement practice has to look a specific way to matter. All-or-nothing thinking combined with aspirational fitness advertising leads to a widely held belief that if we aren’t drenched in sweat or logging hours in the gym or feeling aches after every workout then whatever we did wasn’t “enough”. But it turns out that you have a right to define your movement experience in the same way you define your values: in alignment with the things that bring joy and meaning to your life. 

We are beings that crave locomotion at a cellular, chemical level. But what form that takes is completely up to you. Many of the people I work with who start out believing that they hate exercise had a narrowly defined view of what movement actually is. Most of the physical activity guidelines out there are geared toward lowering cardiovascular disease risk. But this is only one lens with which to view movement. 

There are many valid ways to approach movement that are outside of this narrow focal point. Want to do 5 minutes at a time to break up your work day and ease your aching joints? Want to focus on specific mobility skills so you can complete your favorite hobbies with greater ease? Want to experiment with soothing movements that calm the nervous system and promote sleep at the end of the day? All of these are worthy.

The important thing is making sure your choices are tied to goals that you set for yourself based on what lights your heart on fire. So, my question to you before you start on any movement journey is this: What are your personal values and how can moving your body help you live them? Figure that out and you will be well on your way to a fulfilling and meaningful movement practice you look forward to every day.