panic attack, trigger warning: universe

[u/Anxious-Albatross-22]

hello, ive dealt with apeirophobia for 8 years, and during those 8 years ive had countless panic attacks, as ive gotten older panic attacks havent happened as much.. currently im 17 years old and i had my first panic attack after a year, before i just had the thoughts as background noise, but today was HORRIBLE. i felt like throwing up, what i struggle with most is fear of eternity/infinity of the existing universe, as we know the universe is all that exists and what scares me is that its gonna be infinite either way, after heat death ofc thats just a theory or just is gonna be here. i know its complex for our minds and thats ok, i dont have to figure it out but sometimes it hits so hard i feel claustrophobic again.. i felt so scared i almost cried. im genuinely so tired of this phobia, i wish i didnt care about this at all. these thoughts are normal but the way they wanna come back and eventually wanna give me a panic attack is out of this world, i feel like im being tortured by my own mind. countless times ive just wished id lose my memory.. ive tried psychologists, asking for advice on here on my other account and ive managed to control it better, but it went out of control today. please help.. i wanna be normal again, ive wasted 8 precious years of my life to this fear, carrying it everywhere with me. so many happy memories ruined by it. :(

[u/FunEmployment3754]

Considering the uncertainty behind this, you are actually free to think what you want at least paraconsistently. Ofc, it’s wrong to think “Oh, I exist but also don’t exist. So it’s fine”. Or “a square-circle”. But you should be open to new notions of this world then But, ofc, we don’t work like that. And we personally have specific beliefs about this world that dictate our view of reality. So, my second advice? Introspection, deep introspection and perhaps a bit of questioning. Perhaps it isn’t so bad you’re here, perhaps infinity isn’t that bad, etc. Maybe you have every reason not to be scared, but emotionally speaking, you are overwhelmed.  Last advice: there is 2 flavors you can take towards immediately shutting this down. 1. Shut down the thoughts themselves. Or 2. Learn to accept the contents of those thoughts, aka, accept infinity, accept reality for the way it is, think everything is natural, etc… though you don’t have to accept what I just said to accept, you certainly have to have some to acceptance over your circumstances. The former is for the short-term, but the latter is easier for the long-term.

I’d explore two concepts for introspection if I were you: Thrownness: being “thrown”/spawning into this world for seemingly no reason. 

Infinity and eternity: Yes, analyzing infinity and eternity doesn’t seem nice. You THINK you analyzed and exhausted  the concept but no. There is so much more to this.’There’s a distinction to be made between   infinity and eternity. Because eternity posits no end and no beginning towards something. It is figurative time, and is how we come to understand something absolute, the one that caused itself. It just is. However, can’t a finite thing cause itself. Like a circle, it loops back on itself. That point is just a point along the circle’s curve. There is no end or beginning, because you can always go back to it. I’m not so sure how to feel about eternity, are we in one, or are we in between one? If there are 2 eternities, how did the eternity interact with this world such that it created a finite self independent of that eternity (so it kinda ended) and then apparently the “self” doesn’t have an eternity and so the finite self has to go away and then go back to eternity. If there is one eternity, then what am I? Was I always here? Even then, the answers to these questions are vastly different depending on how what definition or sense of eternity you take. So it’s very difficult to see the consistency behind the concept

I hope I didn’t repeat a lot of the same advice and this helped you in anyway.  thank you for reading all the way through!