Hello Mr. Ritz,

I am glad your heart palpitations calmed down after taking medicine, and that you’re fine now. As for why you react with a delayed panic/anxiety attack upon hearing bad news… I don’t really know. It seems you get triggered by bad news related to not only your family members, but also friends experiencing sickness or personal hardships.

Sounds like I’m some type of empath that absorbs the problems of other people that I know? Why would I be so affected?

Hmm empaths do absorb other people’s emotions, but they are also aware of those emotions. For example, upon hearing the bad news, I think you would immediately start feeling bad, worried, anxious etc. However, you say that it’s not the case with you:

None of these events with friends and family were even on my mind! I didn’t consciously think about them at all after hearing the news, and they didn’t occur until later in the evening, hours after the news was delivered.

Since you weren’t consciously thinking/worrying about the other person’s problem, I don’t think you’re an empath. For you, the reaction came hours later, completely unconsciously, sort of “out of the blue”.

However, what could be happening (this is just an idea) is that you might be suppressing your emotional reactions (because you might have a belief that “boys don’t cry”, for example). And so those valid emotional reactions come out to the surface in form of an anxiety attack?

Maybe this is a stretch, so please disregard if it doesn’t apply. But in any case, it seems like something is triggered – something that is beyond your conscious awareness. One possibility why things are beyond our conscious awareness is that they were not allowed to be expressed, typically in our childhood (say we weren’t allowed to cry or show weakness), and so we have suppressed them.