Agoraphobia is not what most people think it is.

People hear "agoraphobia" and think it means fear of open spaces, or fear of going outside. For me it was nothing that simple. It was a fear of being somewhere I couldn't escape from if my body decided to panic. Supermarkets, buses, queues, barber's chairs, anywhere with no quick exit. The place itself was almost beside the point. What terrified me was the idea of being trapped inside a feeling I couldn't control, surrounded by people who would see me fall apart.

The strange thing is that the "danger" was entirely internal. My heart would race, I would feel dizzy and sick, my hands would tingle, the world would feel unreal. And then my brain would say: "You need to get out. Now." Not in words, exactly. More like a full-body demand. I could be standing in a shop I had been to a hundred times and suddenly feel like I was about to die.

I once had a huge panic attack because it started raining. My brain went straight to "what if it floods and I die?" That was not me being dramatic. That was a threat system stuck on high alert, firing at anything and everything.

It did not happen overnight. It happened through dozens of small, quiet decisions. I would plan to go somewhere, feel the dread building, and think "maybe tomorrow." Tomorrow became next week. Next week became "I just can't do that any more." Before I knew it, my life had shrunk to my house and a handful of routes I could manage on a good day.

I lost my electrician apprenticeship at 16 because I could not physically get into college. I lost friends because I kept cancelling. I dropped to about 8 stone because I developed an irrational fear that eating would make me vomit, and vomiting was one of my biggest panic triggers. I lost a long-term relationship because my girlfriend wanted to live her life and I could not follow.

None of that happened because I was lazy or weak. It happened because my nervous system had learnt a very convincing false alarm, and every time I listened to it, the alarm got louder.

I heard this constantly. From family, friends, even some professionals. "Just relax." "Take deep breaths." "Think positive." The intention was kind, but the effect was the opposite. Here is why.

When I tried to relax in order to make the fear go away, I was treating the fear as the problem. That taught my brain that anxiety was dangerous and needed to be eliminated before I could do anything. So the next time I felt even a small flutter of panic, I would panic about the panic. I was adding a second layer of fear on top of the first.

The other issue was that "just relax" assumes the fear is a choice. It is not. Panic is an automatic nervous-system response. You cannot switch it off by deciding to. What you can do, gradually, is change what your brain does with it. Instead of "I must stop this feeling right now," I eventually learnt to say "I can feel this and still stay here for a short time." That tiny shift was the beginning of everything.

Even when I did go out, I was not really going out freely. I had a whole toolkit of things I relied on to feel safe: always carrying a water bottle, sitting near exits, checking my pulse, needing a "safe person" with me, planning escape routes before I arrived. These felt like lifelines at the time, and in a way they were. But they also kept the fear alive, because they told my brain "you can only cope if you have these things." Take them away and the alarm screamed louder.

I am not saying safety behaviours are evil. They can be stepping stones. But I had to learn to reduce them gradually, or they would have kept me dependent forever.

Panic peaks, then falls. It feels endless when you are inside it, but it is a wave. It rises, it crests, and if you do not add fuel to it with escape or catastrophic thoughts, it comes back down. I had to learn that by experiencing it, not by reading about it. But reading about it helped me believe it might be true.

My body was overprotective, not broken. The alarm was real. The threat was not. My fight-or-flight system was doing exactly what it was designed to do, just in the wrong situations. That reframe helped me stop feeling like something was fundamentally wrong with me.

Confidence came from practice, not pep talks. I did not think my way into being able to walk to the shop. I practised my way there. Shaky, uncomfortable, messy practice. But it was the only thing that gave my nervous system new evidence.