McDonald's, water with sugar and a pinch of anxiety

When I was about 8 years old, I remember sitting on the sofa in the living room of my house, where I lived with my parents and my brother, and I was flipping channels looking for a movie to watch. It was already night and I was alone with my brother in the living room, while our parents watched something in the bedroom. Since the year was 2004, I believe they were watching Da Cor do Pecado - a classic in Brazil in the early 2000s. There is no Brazilian who has lived through the 2000s and has not heard about this telenovela. Or there are also chances that they were watching one of the episodes of Os Normais. It was one of their favorite series back then (when series weren't even known and categorized as series like they are today).

Anyway, my brother and I were chilling in the room. The two of us usually watched TV together at night. We'd go into his room, sit on his bed, and turn on that little tube TV. I liked to get close to the TV during breaks because my hair would stand on end and stick to the screen (if you're wondering: yes, that's what 90s kids used to do when they were bored). The shows we watched the most at night were Kenan & Kel and Pokémon. But sometimes, for some reason, we preferred to stay longer in the living room and looked for something different to watch. The TV was much bigger there. We'd grab the remote and start flipping through all the channels incessantly until something caught our attention. Even though what was interesting to us at that time may be very questionable today. We were really into random and weird cartoons, but sometimes we'd give something different a chance - like "50 First Dates", which we probably watched 50 times. I liked to be completely stretched out on one corner of the couch while my brother was on the other. The couch in our living room always looked giant to me when I was little, but it was probably a "normal-sized couch" for adults. The color was a blue hue, like the deepest part of the ocean or like the cloudless sky when it's getting dark after sunset. Or maybe like the color of a blueberry. Yeah, definitely more like that - imagine a blueberry and that was the color of our couch.

My brother flipped impatiently until we found a movie that was starting on one of the channels listed in our subscription. The movie seemed interesting to us because it was about McDonald's (or involved McDonald's in some way). And Mc was one of our favorite restaurants at the time. I believe our reasoning must have been something like this: it's a movie with McDonald's -> McDonald's is good -> I miss eating Méqui (this is what we call it in Brazil) -> it must be a good movie. A very complex criteria for judging a film, nobody would understand. We settled down on the couch and started watching the American movie, dubbed in Portuguese.

The movie in question was "Super Size Me". I remember being significantly impacted by the film throughout its entire history. Perhaps it was the first film of this genre that I had watched in my life until then. It was a mix of documentary with drama and investigation. In short: it's not a very appropriate movie for 8-year-olds. It basically talks about a guy who decides to eat only McDonald's meals for 30 days to see how his body would react. His intention was to show how fast food can negatively impact one's health. Around day 20/21 of the experience, the film shows that he starts to have heart palpitations and has a few episodes where he feels very sick. There are some scenes, where some doctors advise him to stop doing that, but he decides to insist until he gets to the final day. I felt really bad for him the entire time and felt like his heart palpitations were taking place in mine. I squirmed a little on the big blue sofa, but I didn't ask to stop watching the movie at any point. When it finally ended, my brother got up and went to his room to sleep, but I couldn't do the same. For some reason, this movie was a very big trigger and made me uneasy. I remember finishing watching the movie and running to my parent's room because I wasn't feeling well. I saw everything a little blue (the same blue as the sofa) and felt that something was wrong with me. My heart was racing, my hands were sweating and I was shaking. While I was feeling a bit scared, I couldn't really understand anything. Why was this happening to my body? Was I dying? Was this how people died? Was that what the guy in the movie had started to feel on the 20th/21st day of his experience?

My parents tucked me into bed between them and tried to calm me down. They didn't understand what was going on - but I also didn't know how to explain it. My mother got up and fetched a glass of water with a little sugar in it. I remember picking up the glass and seeing my hand shaking. I could see the sugar swirling in the water. Theoretically, sugar water calms you down - or at least that's what was said in Brazil 30 years ago (I just looked it up on Google and apparently it's a mere placebo effect). I drank fresh water and shivered for a while hugging my mother and watching a cartoon. My mother touched my wrist a few times - she would put her index finger and middle finger pressed against the side of my wrist and look at me worriedly. Her eyes stared deep into mine. I could see she was worried. After a few minutes, I stopped shaking. The sweat was no longer apparent and the heart calmed down. Apparently, the placebo effect of the sugar water had taken effect.

I slept on my parents' bed but arose on my bed the next day. I woke up, I thought about what had happened the other night, but I didn't really pay much attention to it. My day went on normally. I had breakfast with my brother in the kitchen, I went to school with my grandfather and eventually, I would even consider going to the city's shopping mall after school to eat a McDonald's for dinner, if someone had invited me. However, subconsciously (or even a little consciously) the fear of going through that again troubled me for a long time. Several times before going to sleep I would think that maybe I would start to shake and my heart would speed up. And that maybe again there would be a chance that I would get sick and - almost - die.

This situation that happened the day I watched "Super Size Me" was one big (negative) highlight in my life because it was the first time that I really thought I was about to die. I didn't know it and I didn't understand the extent of the incident very well either, but it was actually my first panic attack of many to come throughout my life. I was 8 years old in 2004 and I only understood the depth of this whole situation in 2017 when I started therapy and was diagnosed with GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). Having a panic attack is always very difficult and very complex. However, having a panic attack at the age of eight makes it even more distressing.

One of the biggest problems of anxiety is that it is a self-consuming cycle. If you are an anxious person and you have a moment that destabilizes you in some way, the cycle automatically starts and feeds itself. The momentary malaise becomes something greater precisely because anxiety exists. It's a snowball effect - but in the darkest sense that a snowball can represent. In that episode of Super Size Me, my 8-year-old self must have been a little anxious having associated the actor's malaise with the fact that I also used to eat McDonald's from time to time. Maybe in my head, some association took place that made me conclude that I too could die. Or maybe the movie just touched me because it showed that people are so vulnerable. In the end, everyone could get sick and die. And that idea of losing someone and/or being abandoned scared me a lot.

My life for many years came down to learning how to deal with anxiety. The first few years, in fact, were more suffering from anxiety than learning from it. I started to learn about anxiety much later when it started to impact my social and professional life and therefore I decided to do therapy. But until that moment arrived, many similar events occurred that were very difficult to deal with, but also interesting to analyze. Interesting because once you learn about it and about the triggers that affect you, you can see panic attacks in a different way.

For many years I didn't even know that this incident was actually a panic attack. I only found this out after sharing this moment with my therapist, who informed me that this had indeed been a panic episode.

I start this blog today with the aim of sharing a bit of my story on discovering anxiety, dealing with it over the years, and how I finally learned to embrace it within myself (through a lot of help from my former therapist - and now a big friend). I hope this can help a few people to feel better and feel understood. And at last, I hope this sparks a feeling of empathy.