What Not To Do During Panic

Today's episode is a list of things that you might be doing that are keeping you stuck with disordered anxiety. Enjoy! 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I saw a clip of the show What Not to Wear the other day. Do you remember that? I was obsessed with that show. Me and my sisters would watch that, feels like every single day when we got home from school. Yes, we were big TV kids. I don't know if my parents know that, but they will now. We watched a lot of TV when we got home from school in middle school and high school. And what not to wear was one of my favorite shows. I just saw a clip about it, and I thought, like, that's an interesting concept, what not to wear. And they do tell people what to wear, but first they talk about what's wrong with their current wardrobe, why it's not working. And I was like, you know what? I could do a podcast like that. So today's episode is what not to do during panic. I primarily learned how to recover from disordered anxiety through trial and error. So I have done a lot of things that did not help my recovery. And so I'm gonna share with you some of the things that I would not do during an episode of panic. One of the most frustrating things about panic attacks is that pretty much everything we instinctively want to do during one actually makes them worse. I say this not to add to your frustration, but because understanding this was genuinely one of the biggest turning points in my recovery experience. When I was in the thick of it, I had a whole host of things I would do when I felt a panic attack coming on. And I thought that I was managing it, but what I was actually doing was feeding it. Today I want to walk you through some of the most common mistakes people make during a panic attack, why they feel logical in the moment, and what the research tells us about why they backfire. This is one of those episodes I wish I had had when I was really struggling with panic disorder. So if you know someone who is struggling, please share this with them. I'm not a therapist or a medical professional, and the information in this podcast is based on my own personal experience with anxiety disorders and the things I learned along the way. This is not a replacement for therapy, so take what's helpful to you, leave what isn't, and heed any advice you get from your medical or mental health professionals. Before we get into this list, I want to say something important. If you have done every single thing I'm about to mention, that doesn't make you bad at recovering. It makes you a human. These are things that feel helpful. That's why we do them. Our brain is trying to protect us and it's using the tools that it has in the best way that it can. But part of recovery is learning new tools, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Quick note some of what I'm about to talk about has a flip side, and I'm gonna do a follow-up episode on what to do during an episode of panic. Quick side note, some of what I'm covering today has a flip side, and I'm going to do a follow-up episode on what to do during an episode of panic, so stay tuned for that. If you want more information today on what to do during the onset of panic, I do have a mini ebook on my website that you can get right now, and also a free one-page quick recovery guide, again, based on my own experience, and there's lots of tips on how to manage anxiety and overcome anxiety by using our anxious experiences. Both of those things are available to you at the18minutes.com. Okay, so the first and probably most universal mistake that people make is trying to fight the panic or telling yourself to stop. If you've had an anxiety disorder for any length of time, you've probably said to yourself, stop panicking, calm down, get yourself together. Here's the problem: your brain is currently in threat detection mode. When you tell yourself to calm down or fight what's happening, you're essentially signaling to your brain that there is something to fight, and it ramps it up even more. Tensing your body, clenching your jaw, gripping the steering wheel tightly, all of that physical resistance is communicating danger to your brain. Panic is like a wave. The more you fight it, the more you get knocked around, and you can't really fight a wave. You have to ride it out. I know that stop fighting it sounds impossible when you're in the middle of it. It felt impossible for me too, but it is learnable, I promise. The second thing not to do during panic is seek reassurance. Reassurance seeking is one of the sneakiest mechanisms for trying to find temporary anxiety relief, and one that I used for a long time and sometimes still do. This looks like Googling your symptoms mid-panic, calling someone to be talked down every time you have a panic attack, asking, Am I gonna be okay over and over and over again, or checking your heart rate on your Apple Watch repeatedly. Here's why reassurance feels so good in the moment. It works temporarily. You Google heart-racing anxiety and you feel good for a couple minutes, but then the anxiety comes back, and you have taught your brain that Google equals relief, and so it's gonna send you back to Google again and again and again and again and again. Over time, you need more reassurance to get the same level of relief, and you've accidentally taught your brain that it can't handle uncertainty on its own. The research on this is really clear. Reassurance seeking maintains anxiety rather than reducing it long term. It keeps us stuck in an anxious cycle. This is one of the hardest habits to break, I think, because it can feel like the responsible thing to do when you're panicking. But if you're someone who's constantly checking your symptoms or asking if you're okay, this is an area that you can really make massive progress on. And to be clear, I'm not saying to never tell anyone about your anxiety. Support and community are super valuable. The difference is relying on this external reassurance as your only means of coping with a panic attack. Okay, this is the big one. Avoidance is probably the number one thing that keeps people stuck in an anxiety loop. Avoidance can look like leaving a situation because you feel panic coming on, canceling plans because you're worried that you might have a panic attack, and even rearranging your whole life to avoid anxiety triggers. Just like reassurance seeking, avoidance works short term. You get a little bit of relief. If you leave the grocery store, you feel a little bit of relief, and then you've taught your brain that being at the grocery store equals danger and leaving equals safety. And it's going to try to protect you from that danger even more aggressively next time because it has a new data point. This is how anxiety disorders get worse. The thing that feels like it's protecting you is actually the thing that's making the anxiety grow. This is also why recovery involves doing things even when we feel anxious and not waiting until we feel ready. Because with patterns of avoidance, we never feel ready. I avoided so many things for so many years: travel, restaurants, social situations, eating certain foods. And every time I did that, I made the world smaller. If this resonates with you, I want you to know that it's incredibly common and there's nothing wrong with you. Avoidance is a very natural reaction to stress and fear, but it's also something that we can work to change. Another thing that I would not do during panic is use unhelpful breathing patterns. You've probably been told to just breathe during an episode of panic or focus on your breathing. And there are some breathing techniques that can be genuinely helpful, but there are some common ways people use breathing that actually keep them feeling anxious. The most common one is over-breathing or hyperventilating, where we take big deep breaths to try to just breathe through our anxiety, like and just doing that over and over again. And what that actually can do is lower our CO2 levels, which makes us feel lightheaded, dizzy, short of breath, which for the record is also not dangerous. You don't have to be afraid of that if that's something that you wind up doing accidentally. But it definitely makes the experience more uncomfortable. Another trap is becoming so hyper-fixated on your breathing that it becomes its own source of anxiety. All of a sudden, you're watching every breath you take, wondering if you're doing it correctly. And now your breathing, which is supposed to be automatic, feels like something you have to control manually. If breathing techniques help you, then that's wonderful. Keep using them. But slow and gentle, natural breathing is the goal, not these over-dramatic big inhales and exhales. This next one happens fast. You might notice your heart racing, and within a second, your brain has decided you're having a heart attack or you're having a stroke, something is dangerously wrong, and you need urgent medical attention. This is catastrophizing. Catastrophizing the physical sensations we get during a panic attack makes sense. The feelings are so intense, and our brain is trying to make sense of them and come up with a story for why it's happening. But monitoring every sensation you have and wondering why it's happening to you and checking to see if it's getting any worse, and generally trying to solve the problem mid-panic is actually going to add fuel to the anxiety. Panic attacks peak and then they pass. They always do. But when we're spinning out mentally and looking for meaning behind every sensation and trying to solve the panic problem we're having and going through the list of unending bad case scenarios, we make the panic last longer and feel more intense than it needs to. One of the most powerful things I ever learned about panic disorder is that we can't think our way out of it because the thinking brain is essentially turned off when the threat detection system is turned on. The tools that work during panic are body-based, not thought-based. More on that in the next episode. The last thing I would not do during panic is isolate. A lot of people develop a habit of hiding their anxiety, going to the bathroom, sitting in your car, finding a place to let the panic happen to you where no one can see you. I get it. Panic attacks feel embarrassing to have in front of other people. But constantly avoiding letting other people see that you're uncomfortable or feeling anxious adds shame to the situation, and shame doesn't make panic better. It also can reinforce the idea that panic is dangerous and unacceptable and needs to be hidden when in reality it's a normal physiological response that is not dangerous at all. You don't have to announce it to the room, but if there's a safe person around who you can tell that you're feeling anxious, that can actually help. Not for reassurance, but for the grounding effect of human connection. Scary things are generally scarier alone. Don't feel like you have to hide the fact that you're having an adrenaline surge from people who care about you. So to recap, fighting the panic, seeking reassurance, overbreathing, catastrophizing, and hiding are all things that make us feel safe temporarily, but actually worsen anxiety in the long term. If you've been doing any of these things, that does not mean you're doing recovery completely wrong or that you're at square one and that any of the work you've done means nothing. It means you've been doing what our brains are designed to do, and that is survive things that feel scary. The good news is that every single one of these patterns can be unlearned. And once you start to make that shift, recovery might happen faster than you think. In a couple weeks, I'm gonna talk about what to do during a panic attack, and specifically how to ride out a panic attack in a way that retrains our brain over time. So make sure you're following the podcast so you don't miss it. If this episode resonated with you, I would love to hear about it. You can send me a message on any of my social channels, pop in my TikTok live on Thursday afternoons, or send me an email at amandathe18minutes.com. Thank you so much for being here today, and we'll see you next time.