Hi y'all, long text and a lot of musing, be warned..

Anyhow. I had massive sequential panic attacks and extreme anxiety occur 3 (or was it 4?) years ago. Since then I've done a lot to get over it, changing my lifestyle a lot, getting a new job, going through therapy, starting SSRIs which I've successfully had on less than the starting dose for past half a year, etc.

Albeit I certainly can get anxious about pretty much anything - like as a kid I'd lose sleep over being afraid of meteors hitting Earth and stuff - one of the largest sources of anxiety and a typical trigger component in my panic attacks is the fear of a heart attack.

Yesterday I was watching the UEFA soccer match between Finland and Denmark and saw, live on my screen, one of the players, Christian Eriksen, suffer what was apparently some form of a cardiac event. Having been in no physical contact with anyone, he just suddenly collapsed. Went limb, down to the ground, you could see his open eyes just staring emptily into space. It was very obvious that something was horribly wrong.

The medics rush in, after a while they start adminstrating CPR, the players of the Danish team form a circle around Christian. When someone collapses that quickly, in a middle of a sport game, they often do not make it. I was also sure that Christian was dead. Thankfully, the medics did manage to revive him and he was conscious when he was taken to a hospital.

I'll say that I really did not want to see that happen live. It was really frightening and immediately triggered my own fears of having a random heart attack.

Rationally, I can know two things:

\- The chance of me having a heart attack, a fit 30-year old who does a decent amount of exercise and eats relatively healthy, who's had several ECGs and a heart echo taken with all signs pointing to a very healthy heart, are so close to zero that I'm really much more likely to die by slipping when I get up from the bed. Yet I am not afraid of my bed.

\- But no amount of examinations, checks or lifestyle choices can fully close out the possibility of a sudden lethal cardiac event. Just can't. There's no way to ever truly be 100% sure that I don't die in the next 30 seconds, or during writing this text here.

There's a few things I also know are keys to managing anxiety like this. Beyond all the therapy, meds, lifestyle choices - all of which you do - there's also some more fundamental realizations that can help. But holding to them is tough at times.

First, one just has to accept the impermanence of things. Nothing lasts forever and that's how the world is. Why does death even matter to us, when we wont be here anymore to know about it? Is it really a big issue to lose our awareness? From evolution's standpoint, we are of course built to avoid death since if we didn't avoid death, we'd be extinct. But your or my death doesn't mean the end of humanity, actually it's really an end to barely anything at all. We're such minuscule parts of a greater whole that we really should just be thankful to be here to witness that greater thing to begin with.

Secondly, in this situation there really were people way, way more touched by this than me. For crying out loud, the man's wife saw it happen just before her, and she had to live through those excruciating minutes of not knowing whether her husband was going to make it or not. Isn't it a little bit selfish for me to immediately focus to my own fears in such a moment? I think it is. And I know for sure that practicing empathic thoughts and doing good things for others also helps our own anxieties. Death, I suppose, is also a lot less of an issue if we can leave this existence with the knowledge that we left the world better off than it would have been without us. Simple things, like helping a mom and their baby carriage off a train or even just hoping good for someone else genuinely make us feel better about ourselves, and each other.

Yet when something like this happens - seeing a man almost die on a live stream - it just rushes over me way too fast for me to stop my own fears from triggering.

Tho, as I write this, I can kinda feel my own fears already alleviate. So idk. Maybe I just wanted to analyze this. I suppose I could now just delete this text, but then, I am curious about if anyone else was touched by this, and what kind of thoughts cases like this bring up in people.

Idk. Long text. Thanks for reading.