323: 3 tips to stop anxiety or panic attacks
Welcome to the Joyful Mom Podcast!
3 Tips to Calm Down When You Are in Fight or Flight
Do you know that feeling when you feel so completely out of control? And like your body and mind are completely going nuts, your system is completely overwhelmed and you have no clue what is up from down and you are just in a state of pure survival? Well, I do too, and today I’m going to give you some tips to calm your body down when your body gets in that state.
Because it’s so terrible to be in that state it can even be hard to think what to do, or the panic about being in that state can increase and just make things worse. So I will give you 3 tips. If you like these 3 tips and want to have an even better resource to help you, I created a RESET mini program that gives you all these resources plus more when you are experiencing a panic attack or anxiety attack at the moment. For example, instead of just knowing about a breathing exercise, and having to try to remember, you can just go inside of the program, press play, and listen to the exercise to help you calm down and ground.
So let’s dive into the things I’m going to share with you today…number one:
Different types of breathing exercises are amazing for calming down your body and mind. If you think about it- if you are in a state of panic, what is your breath probably like? It’s probably short, shallow, quick breaths. This communicates in a loop to your brain that there is danger, and along with other things that are going on, this can continue to increase the whole cycle of panic or anxiety. So intentionally slowing your breath down, taking long deep slow breaths, and longer exhales than inhales. So one of my favorites is the 4-7-8 breathing technique. You breathe in for 4, hold for 7, and exhale for 8. I have actually found that it can be hard to hold my breath for that long and breathe out for that long, so you can shorten a bit if you want to like 3-6-7 or 4-5-7. Let’s do a round or two together so you can get practice for it.
Shock your system. When your body is in a state of panic or fight or flight, it can feel like everything is out of control, and your body is just going on autopilot. Do something to shock your system. Do something to create a pattern to interrupt or break the fight or flight cycle that is going on. An example of this could be taking a really cold shower, getting ice-cold water on your face, or something of that nature. Just changing the state of what your body is experiencing can be enough to get your body out of that state.
Do something outside of your body and mind. Focusing on the sensations that are going on in your body and getting more worked about them actually increases the panic and anxiety that you are already experiencing. So bring your awareness to things outside of you. Noticing details, colors, textures, and sounds, of things in the room around you. Even going through some of your favorite places love in your mind, that bring you peace and comfort. The sensations in your body are not going to kill you if they are from an anxiety or panic attack, and the more you can ignore them, not care about them, and focus on other things, the more your body and mind will get that there’s actually no big deal and nothing needs to be going on.
So this episode is pretty short with these ideas, but I want to give you some tangible, tactile things you could do immediately to stop a panic or anxiety attack. If you want everything all in one place with easy-to-listen audio, where you don’t have to try to think or remember anything, you can join RESET for just $17 by going to RESET.
If you want to learn more about how you can clear anxiety more automatically by rewiring how the mind is working and processing things, go to my website www.meganhillukka.com where you can click on a link to register for my free training, where I will show you what you need in order to do this.
