Anxiety Disorder and Sensory Overload

What if anxiety does not always come only from within?

Anxiety disorders are usually sought where they seemingly belong: in the psyche. In the past. In traumatic experiences. In stress, overload, or inner vulnerability.

We had such explanations too. They sounded plausible, sometimes even comforting. At last there were words for what was happening: panic attacks, flashbacks, sensory overload, inner restlessness, loss of control. But the longer we lived with these terms, the more a quiet question grew:

What if they did not explain everything?

When the Room Reacts Too

In Dicke Luft, we tell of moments when fear did not begin like a thought. Not as a memory, not as a worry, not as a conscious apprehension.

It was suddenly there.

An uneasy feeling when entering a room. Pressure in the head. Palpitations. Irritability. The urge to leave immediately. Sometimes it turned into panic. Sometimes into conflict. Sometimes into a state in which one’s own body reacted like a foreign warning system.

Back then, we almost always looked for the cause in ourselves. In our history. In our relationship. In our resilience. In our diagnoses.

For a long time, we did not question the room itself.

Anxiety, Panic, and Sensory Overload

What was especially hard to understand was that fear rarely came alone for us. It appeared together with exhaustion, insomnia, headaches, memory problems, inner tension, sudden anger, overwhelm, and the feeling of no longer being able to filter the world.

Today we wonder whether that, precisely, was an important clue.

Perhaps in some situations fear was not only an emotional signal. Perhaps it was part of a larger bodily state of overload. A reaction to something invisible that nevertheless accompanied every breath.

The Possible Confusion

The dangerous thing about it is the similarity.

Palpitations can be anxiety. Pressure in the chest can be anxiety. Shortness of breath, inner restlessness, dizziness, derealization, irritability, and loss of concentration can look like anxiety, or trigger anxiety.

But what if, in some moments, the body reacts to the environment first, and only afterwards does the psyche try to interpret that alarm signal?

What if a person does not become “panicked for no reason,” but is reacting to a burden that no one measures, no one smells, and no one takes seriously?

Why This Topic Will Not Let Go Of Us

We are not claiming that indoor air simply explains anxiety disorders.

But Dicke Luft raises a question that became possible for us only very late:

What if some states of anxiety should be viewed not only biographically, psychologically, or neurologically, but also spatially?

Not as a substitute for therapy. Not as a counter-model to medicine. But as an additional way of looking at the place where a person lives, sleeps, works, argues, loves, and breathes.

Perhaps the air is not the whole answer.

But perhaps it is part of the question we overlooked for far too long.

Why We Are Writing About This

Dicke Luft is not an attempt to reinterpret anxiety disorders across the board. It is a personal search for clues. A story about diagnoses, overwhelm, panic, relationship conflicts, and the gradual realization that we may need to look for answers not only in the psyche, but also in the environment.

The book connects personal experience with scientific indications of the health relevance of indoor air. It invites readers to consider anxiety, panic, and sensory overload not only biographically or psychologically, but also with the room in mind in which a person lives, works, sleeps, argues, loves, and breathes.