5 Simple Ways To Calm Down Before Your Brain Goes Off The Rails
Tima Ilyasov | Unsplash You wake up one morning, happy that your life is finally on track. But even under the veil of turning lemons into lemonade, something isn’t right. You don’t feel completely in control, and at times you even feel breathless. Your heart feels like it’s about to burst. You’re immobilized and stuck in place, incapable of doing anything.
Then, just as suddenly as it came on, your heart slows down, and your breathing gets easier. You are normal once more ... for now. What’s going on in these cases is not a heart attack, but rather something equally as challenging to your way of life. It’s called panic disorder.
Mayo Clinic states, "A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reactions when there is no real danger or apparent cause... Many people have just one or two panic attacks in their lifetimes, and the problem goes away, perhaps when a stressful situation ends. But if you've had recurrent, unexpected panic attacks and spent long periods in constant fear of another attack, you may have a condition called panic disorder."
For many, looking for a solution first involves a trip to the ER. But after countless visits to the doctor and prescriptions that make you feel like a zombie, you know two things: You suffer from panic attacks, and the primary panic disorder treatment is medication.
The problem is, the meds make you feel listless and devoid of your personality. So, you decide to see if you can endure it on your own. But these panic feelings always return. Sometimes worse, sometimes a mere fraction of what’s possible in the worst of times.
One thing is for sure: when it comes to suffering from panic attacks, you’re not alone. According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, some 5 percent of women and 2 percent of men have had panic attacks at one time or another within a lifetime. Some conditions persist for years. Others come and go based on stress or other underlying challenges. So if medication isn’t working for you, what else you can you do?
The short answer is that medication as a panic disorder treatment does relieve suffering and pain in the short term. But it is not the long-term solution for everyone. Most therapists agree that the combination of medication and behavioral/perceptual change makes the difference. If you’re looking for alternative panic disorder treatments, here are some strategies.
Here are 5 simple ways to calm down before your brain goes off the rails:
1. Recognize that your panic is the stress response
In fact, your panic attack is identical in every aspect to what happens when we feel under attack. Think about the human response to a threat or imminent danger (imagine real danger — you’re being chased by a bear or attacked by bees). In those moments, our immediate and instinctive reaction is to panic.
Research shows that when you're having a panic attack, your amygdala goes into overdrive and sets off the same alarm bells it would if you were actually being chased by a bear or attacked by bees. Your brain genuinely can't tell the difference between a panic attack and real danger, which is why everything feels so terrifyingly real even when you're completely safe.
The reaction in your brain is the same when you have a panic attack. The amygdala is activated, causing a variety of symptoms that we associate with being in severe danger. When you experience a panic attack, you experience this same response, as if it were real and you had to immediately get out of harm's way. Once you understand this, you will know how to reverse a panic attack.
2. Use relaxation techniques
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To extinguish a panic attack, you need to activate a relaxation response. That’s why breathing exercises are effective. But there are a lot of other techniques that can induce the relaxation response, including: relaxing your muscles, calming your thought processes, resting, and in some cases, exercise can harness the energy of the panic and eventually deliver a relaxing response.
In an ideal setting, it’s best to learn many different ways to calm your mind/body. It’s rarely a one-size-fits-all approach. Try many things to see what works best for you.
A Stanford Medicine study found that just five minutes of breathing exercises can seriously dial down your anxiety by turning on your body's natural chill-out system. What works is different for everyone, so you might need to experiment with things like deep breathing, muscle relaxation, or mindfulness before you figure out which one actually helps you.
3. Silence your negative thoughts
When you have panic attacks, they fuel your negative thoughts, which aggravate your panic attacks. So, if you have negative thoughts, your panic attacks will get worse, rather than get better.
When you start thinking catastrophic stuff like "My racing heart means I'm dying," it just makes your panic way worse and keeps the whole horrible cycle spinning, research explains. The good news is that learning to catch those scary thoughts and swap them out for something more realistic actually works really well at stopping panic attacks before they take over.
Reducing and eliminating toxic thinking is an effective way to stop panic attacks in your life. There are a lot of techniques that allow you to do that, including challenging negative thoughts, installing positive thoughts, and rehearsing positive thoughts and conditioning yourself to be positive, among others.
4. Idenity and deal with your panic triggers
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Some people know exactly what can trigger their panic attacks. They can even remember the original incident or what event caused the first panic attack to occur. To heal the past from causing deeper panic to set in, you need to detoxify your memory of your triggers, especially if a trigger truly isn’t life-threatening at all. Reach out if you need help.
Studies have revealed that lots of people get panic attacks when something reminds them of a past trauma or really stressful event, so figuring out what sets you off is huge for getting better. Therapy can help you work through these trigger memories until they stop having so much power over you, especially once you really understand that the trigger itself can't actually hurt you anymore.
5. Set a calmer pace for your life
Living a life full of anxiety and stress makes you prone to panic attacks. If your environment is super stressful, consider how you can change your life so it’s calmer and more productive.
Research has indicated that living with constant stress basically primes your body to have panic attacks because all those stress chemicals, like adrenaline, just keep building up. One big study found that when people dealt with stressful stuff like family fights or work drama, their panic symptoms got noticeably worse within just a few months, so toning down the chaos in your life genuinely helps cut down on how often panic hits.
By living a life of stress and anxiety, you are truly short-changing yourself. Isn’t it time to stop doing this and learn to be effective in whatever you are doing? It’s also the path to conquer your panic attacks.
Although panic disorder is a definitive diagnosis, having panic attacks is not a problem you have to deal with forever. Panic attacks and panic disorder are indicators that something is not quite right in your life. It could be a past psychological trauma that still needs to be healed.
The big question you need to ask yourself is this: Are the panic attacks you are experiencing an indication of ongoing continuing stressors in your life, or just some past post-traumatic stress? Depending on your answer, you have to do some work to do to lead the life you most want to love. Just know you’re not alone and help can be found by advocating for yourself.
Dr. Douglas Kong is a retired psychiatrist who specialized in stress management, psychological treatment, and self-help.
