Somewhere between the second and third pass of the clippers, my brain decided I was dying.

One second I was chatting with my barber about a family trip to Disneyland. The next, a small nick behind my ear convinced me he'd cut an artery and everyone in the shop was watching me quietly bleed out. That's the thing about a panic attack — it doesn't knock. It kicks the door in.

I'm writing this because if you're the kind of person researching plant-medicine retreats, breathwork, or psychedelic-assisted work for anxiety, trauma, or stuck patterns, you've almost certainly been in this room before. Maybe not a barber's chair. Maybe a subway platform, a work meeting, a partner's kitchen. Different setting, same nervous system. And what happens next — what the people around you do — matters more than most of us admit.

What a Panic Attack Actually Feels Like From the Inside

Let me describe it in the plainest language I can, because the clinical descriptions never quite land. Your chest tightens. Sounds get muffled, like someone shoved cotton in your ears. Your vision narrows. You feel like you're watching yourself from a few feet above your own body — a dissociative floating that would be interesting if it weren't so terrifying.

In my case, I leapt out of the chair mid-haircut, lay down on the cement floor, and somehow had the presence of mind to fish my insurance card out of my wallet and toss it on the ground next to me. For the paramedics. So they'd know where to send the bill after the heart attack I was absolutely, definitely, one-hundred-percent about to have.

I was in my early thirties. Healthy. I'd been diagnosed with PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder years earlier, and I'd done the work — therapy, medication, sleep, exercise, all of it. And still. Panic sneaks. It waits for the moment you've decided you're finally past it, and then it drops through the ceiling.

The Firefighter's Sigh

Someone in the shop called 911. Half a dozen firefighters showed up, which is roughly five and a half more than the situation required. They checked my vitals — elevated, obviously — and then came the question that always comes: any pre-existing conditions?

I told them the truth. Anxiety. Panic attacks. Medications, which I listed one by one.

One of them sighed. Loudly. A few others turned around and started walking back to the truck. And I want to be clear about something: I'm a person who talks openly about mental health. I write about it. I've encouraged strangers to seek help. And in that moment, on that floor, still half-covered in hair clippings, I felt about two inches tall. Like I'd wasted their time. Like the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf was real and only I could see it.

That sigh has stayed with me longer than any of the physical symptoms did. Not because the firefighter was cruel — he probably wasn't. He was tired. He had other calls. But dismissal at the exact moment you're most raw does something specific to a person. It teaches you to hide the next one.

Then My Barber Did the Simplest Thing

Once the firefighters cleared out, I climbed back into the chair with a half-finished haircut, a soaked shirt, and a wallpaper of shame plastered across my face.

My barber looked at me and said, “You good, bro?”

Then he picked the clippers back up. Started cutting. Asked me something about the ride at Disneyland we'd been talking about ten minutes earlier. He didn't pity me. He didn't ask if I wanted to talk about it. He didn't tell me a story about his cousin who also has anxiety. He just kept going, calm as a lake, as though the last twenty minutes were a mild inconvenience and not a crisis.

It was the most helpful thing anyone has ever done for me during a panic attack. And he had zero training. No therapy background. No trauma-informed certification. He just stayed steady, and his steadiness told my nervous system what my thinking brain couldn't: you're safe, this is a Tuesday, we're still cutting your hair.

Why Logic Doesn't Work (and What Does)

Here's something I wish more people understood — including, gently, some of the well-meaning folks who show up when someone's in crisis. You cannot reason a person out of a panic attack. The part of the brain that processes logic goes quiet when the amygdala is running the show. Telling someone “you're fine, calm down” during a panic spiral is roughly as useful as reading them a spreadsheet.

What actually helps, in my experience and in most of what I've heard from others who live with this:

• Presence. Just being there. Not fixing. Not talking at them.
• A steady voice. Slow, low, unhurried. Your nervous system co-regulates with the calmest one in the room.
• Permission to be a mess. No commentary on how they look, sound, or are behaving.
• Ordinariness. Treating them like a person, not a project. This is the part my barber nailed.
• Time. Panic attacks peak and recede. Nobody stays in the worst part forever, even though it feels like they will.

I have my own tools, and they work — most of the time. There's the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, where you name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste. It pulls you back into the room by force. I also use a small handheld device that pulses gently in each hand, alternating left and right, which helps my nervous system settle. Bilateral stimulation, similar to what EMDR therapists use.

But here's the honest part nobody tells you at the trauma workshop: in the worst moments, I can't reach my tools. My thinking brain is offline. That's when someone else's calm becomes the tool.

Where Plant Medicine and Retreat Work Fit Into This

If you're reading this because you're considering an ayahuasca retreat, a psilocybin container, or some other form of plant-medicine work for anxiety or trauma, I want to say something specific to you.

These experiences can crack you open in beautiful and terrifying ways. Panic — real, floor-of-the-maloca, I-am-dying panic — is not uncommon during ceremony. Any facilitator worth their salt will tell you this openly. The medicine amplifies whatever's in the basement of your psyche, and sometimes what's down there fights back on its way up. This isn't a bug in the system. It's often the whole point.

Which is why the quality of the container matters so much more than the aesthetics of the retreat. When you're weighing whether to book something, ask hard questions about who is in the room with you when things get difficult. How many facilitators per participant? Are they trained in trauma-aware presence, or just in singing icaros? What happens if someone in ceremony has a panic response — is the answer “we hold space”, or is it something more specific and grounded than that? A calm human beside you at 3am, three hours into a difficult journey, is worth more than any curated Instagram feed of jungle sunsets.

The same principle from the barbershop applies in the ceremony space. You need someone who can stay calm when you can't. Someone who won't sigh. Someone who treats your terror like a normal weather pattern that will pass, because they've seen it pass a hundred times before.

What I've Learned About Being on the Other Side of It

Since that day, I've been the calm person in the room for other people a few times — friends, colleagues, once a stranger on a plane. And I try to remember what my barber did. Not what the firefighter did.

You don't need training. You don't need the right words. You mostly need to slow your own breathing down, sit within arm's reach, and be willing to be boring. Boring is a superpower during someone else's crisis. Boring says: this isn't an emergency to me, so it doesn't have to be an emergency to you either.

If you're the one who has panic attacks — welcome, I'm sorry, you're in a very large club nobody wanted to join. More than one in five adults live with some form of mental-health condition in a given year. You're not crazy. You're not broken. You're not alone, even when everything in your body is screaming that you are.

And if you're at the point where you're seriously considering plant-medicine work as part of your healing, do the research, take your time, and pick your container carefully. For readers who want to explore that path further, a range of curated ayahuasca and psychedelic retreats — many with genuine trauma-aware facilitation — can be browsed on our marketplace here. Whatever you choose, may the people beside you be barbers, not firefighters in a hurry.