Read this first. If you have chest pain or heaviness, shortness of breath, a racing or irregular heartbeat, fainting, or numbness down one side — stop reading and get medical help today. Those are the symptoms most commonly listed on psychic attack pages, and they are also the symptoms of cardiac events, panic disorder, thyroid disease and anaemia. No practitioner worth speaking to would tell you otherwise.
If low mood, dread or sleeplessness has been sitting on you for weeks, that deserves a doctor's attention too, before it deserves a spiritual explanation.
We are a coven of practitioners and we will still tell you this, because the alternative — a symptom list that catches everything and sends you nowhere — is how people get badly hurt in this trade.
Why the usual symptom lists are useless
Look at what a typical psychic attack page lists: fatigue, headaches, nausea, insomnia, nightmares, digestive trouble, unexplained aches, chills, tingling, anxiety, low mood, panic, confusion, mood swings, dread.
That is not a description of spiritual attack. That is a description of being a human being under strain. Every one of those symptoms is produced by anxiety, depression, burnout, grief, poor sleep, or a dozen ordinary illnesses — and a list that includes all of them will confirm attack for literally anyone who reads it.
A list that can never come out negative is not a diagnostic tool. It is a sales funnel.
A question that actually separates them
Here is the one distinction we find genuinely useful after years of being asked this.
Does it travel with you, or does it stay somewhere?
Anxiety, depression and physical illness come with you. They are there at your mother's house, on holiday, at a friend's flat at two in the afternoon. They do not care where you are because the source is not in the room.
Directed work and heavy places behave differently. The weight lifts when you leave and returns when you come back. It is worse in one room than another. It is worse around one specific person and absent when they are not there. You go away for a week and feel like yourself, and it settles back over you within a day of returning.
That pattern — bounded by place or by person — is the one that makes a practitioner sit up. A fog that follows you everywhere is a body-and-mind question first.
If you cannot tell which of those describes you, that is not a failure of perception — it is genuinely hard from the inside. Our live chat is the fastest way to work it through with someone who asks the right questions rather than hands you a symptom list.
Three more distinctions worth knowing
Onset. Anxiety and depression build. They have a slope. Directed work tends to land — people can often name the fortnight, and several unconnected areas of life turned at once.
Other people. Your own perception is the least reliable instrument you own when you are frightened. But when visitors comment that a room feels wrong, when a pet refuses a particular spot, when someone who does not know what you suspect says something unprompted — that is corroboration, and it carries weight.
Response to ordinary fixes. Sleep, food, sunlight, exercise, a week off, talking to someone. These help anxiety and burnout genuinely and measurably. They tend to make very little difference to a place or a tie that is actively draining. Try them first, honestly, for a fortnight. The result is information either way.
Both can be true
The framing that treats this as either-or does people a disservice.
Someone under sustained hostility from a person in their life will be anxious. That anxiety is real, and it has a cause outside them, and it would be there whether or not anyone had lit a candle. Treating the spiritual layer while ignoring that they have not slept properly in three months helps nobody, and neither does the reverse.
The practitioners we trust work alongside doctors and therapists, not instead of them. Anyone who tells you to stop a medication, or that a doctor will not understand, is a person to walk away from immediately and without apology.
What to do next, in order
Rule out the physical. Actually go. Blood tests are cheap and they rule out a surprising amount.
Then look at your life honestly — what changed in the weeks before this started, who you have been around, what you have been carrying.
Then, if the pattern is bounded by a place or a person, and ordinary rest has not touched it, that is the point at which spiritual work is the right tool. A cleansing is where to start, because it clears whatever is there without you having to be certain first.
Talk it through before you decide
This is the single hardest thing to work out alone, and it is the question our live chat gets most often. Open it at the bottom of this page and describe what has been happening — when it started, where it is worst, whether it follows you.
We will tell you honestly which of the three you appear to be in, including when the answer is that this sounds like something a doctor should look at and not something we should sell you. That answer is free and you will get it from us more often than you might expect.
If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please contact a crisis line or emergency services in your country — that is a real emergency and it needs real help, now.
Or browse our protection and cleansing work.