Why Can't I Calm Down?!

On this episode of The 18 Minutes I get into the science behind why it feels IMPOSSIBLE to calm down during an episode of intense anxiety or panic, and what we can do about it. Enjoy! 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I'm glad you're here today. The tea I told you I make every single time I record an episode, I typically make with oat milk. And today I didn't have oat milk, but I did have heavy whipping cream. It truly is the little things in life. You will be listening to this if you're listening to it the day it comes out. And if you want to know when it comes out and get notified, you can hit follow on whichever platform you're listening to this podcast. You will be listening to this on Friday, April 10th. And I'm pre-recording this because I'm going to be in Oaxaca, Mexico. While I'm on my trip, I'm going to be documenting my travel experience as someone who used to have panic disorder and now travels with some anxiety. So if that concept resonates with you and you are an anxious traveler, an anxious flyer, you can follow along on any of my social media channels. I got TikTok, I got Instagram, I got YouTube, and maybe find some videos that are helpful to you that change your perspective a little bit, or things that are just relatable and make you feel less alone in your anxiety journey. I love traveling. It makes me anxious. I know it's a big deal to a lot of people to be able to travel for the first time or be able to travel again. So I'm specifically going with the intention of documenting all of the anxiety triggers and how I work through them and how I use them to continue to overcome fears. Today I'm answering a question that Panic Disorder Amanda asked several times every single day of her life. And that is, why can't I calm down? If you have ever been in the middle of an anxiety spiral and someone told you to just calm down, you probably threw something at them, and that would be well within your right, because if we could do that, we would, obviously. And here's what's interesting about that. There's actually a really good neurological reason why calming down in the middle of panic feels impossible. And learning this information really changed the way that I relate to my own anxiety. Even doing the research for this episode has given me a new perspective on why I feel the way that I feel sometimes. Today I'm breaking down what's actually happening in our brains and bodies when we can't calm down, why the common advice is kind of backwards, and what actually works instead. This is one of those episodes that I think is going to make things really click for you. So let's get into it. As always, I'm not a therapist or a medical professional, and the information in this podcast is based on my own personal experience with disordered anxiety. This is not a replacement for therapy, so please take only what's helpful for you, leave what isn't, and heed any advice you get from your medical and mental health professionals. A quick note before we dive in: a lot of what I'm covering today connects with what I covered in my last episode about what not to do during panic. So if you haven't listened to that one, I recommend going back and starting there. And if you want a deeper dive and tools on what to do during panic, I have a mini ebook available on my website as well as a short one-page recovery guide. The links for both of those things are in the show notes. Okay, so first let's talk about what's going on neurologically when anxiety first hits you and you can't calm down. Your brain has a structure called the amygdala. Think of this as your brain's alarm system. Its whole job is to scan for threats and sound the alarm when a threat is detected. When the amygdala fires, it triggers your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight response. Heart racing, beating faster, muscle tension, your digestion slowing down. All of that is your body preparing to either fight or run from a threat. Here's the part that changed how I relate to my anxiety. The amygdala does not wait for the thinking brain to weigh in. It acts first and asks questions later. By the time you're consciously aware that you're feeling anxious, the physiological response is already rolling. And here's why just calm down is really unhelpful advice. When we're in the middle of a panic attack, we can't think our way out of it. The prefrontal cortex, which is the rational, logical thinking part of our brain, actually goes partially offline when a threat is detected. You literally have reduced access to logic and reasoning when you're in the middle of a panic attack. So when you're completely spiraling and trying to rationalize your way out of it and it's not working, there's nothing wrong with you. That's just how your brain works. When the alarm bells go off, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol, which are our stress hormones. These are what create most of the physical sensations of anxiety, like a racing heart, um, shaking hands, chest tightness, that feeling of dread and a sense of doom. Adrenaline in particular is fast acting, but fast to clear out of our bodies. The peak of a panic attack, or that most intense part of it, is typically pretty short because our bodies literally cannot sustain that amount of adrenaline for that long. It runs out. In case you're interested in more science, the half-life of adrenaline is about two to five minutes. But, and this is important, cortisol sticks around much longer. Cortisol's half-life is about 60 to 90 minutes, so it can stay elevated in your system literally for hours after a stressful event or a panic attack, which is why anxiety can have that lingering, unsettled feeling much longer after the initial spike has passed. This is also why back-to-back stressors feel so hard to get over. If your cortisol is already elevated from one thing, the next thing hits a system that's already primed and activated. So it feels overwhelming and never-ending because you're working with a system that hasn't completely metabolized the stress hormones from the previous stressful event. I want to talk about a concept that I learned about recently that I find really useful here, and that is the window of tolerance. The window of tolerance is basically the zone in which your whole nervous system is regulated and you can respond to things instead of react to them, and you feel calm and balanced. When we're inside that window, we function pretty well. When we get pushed outside of it, either into hyper-arousal, which is that anxious, panicky, overwhelmed feeling, or hypo-arousal, which is that checked out, dissociated, numb state, our ability to regulate and be chill goes way down. For people with anxiety disorders, that window can be really narrow. Things that wouldn't push other people outside of their window push us way outside of ours. And once we're outside of it, trying to think and reason our way back into it can be really hard, if not impossible. The goal of a lot of recovery work is actually to widen that window so that more things are more tolerable to us. I mentioned in my last episode how when I was avoiding things consistently, I made my world smaller and smaller and smaller. And essentially, what I did through recovery is widen my window of tolerance. So I could go to restaurants without feeling dysregulated, and I could travel on airplanes without feeling dysregulated. So the way that we widen that window is by not avoiding the things that trigger us. It's by gradually, intentionally exposing ourselves to this activation experience and practicing coming back to regulation, which is really the basis for exposure-related anxiety treatments. It took me a long time to understand that telling myself to calm down and trying to not feel anxiety in whatever means necessary was actually adding a layer of activation onto my already stressed and activated nervous system. When you're anxious and you're frustrated that you're anxious, or you're scared that the anxiety won't go away, or you're judging yourself for not being able to calm down, you're actually adding a layer of stress to your already overwhelmed system. You're communicating more threat signals to your amygdala. The anxiety about the anxiety is often much worse than the original anxiety. And people who experience disordered anxiety, I think know exactly what I mean when I say that. Fighting the feelings, resisting it, being upset by it does not speed up the process of getting better. If anything, it slows it down. The nervous system calms down when it gets signals of safety, not signals of more threats. So if we can't think our way out of it and fighting against it makes it worse, what do we do? The short answer is work with your body, not against it. The fear center of our brain responds to physical signals of safety. Slow, extended exhales activate our parasympathetic nervous system, which is also known as our rest and digest system, and is the counterpart to the fight or flight system. Even one exhale that's longer than your inhale can send a message and start to signal that the threat is passing. Movement can also help. Your body prepared to fight or run. So sometimes giving it a physical outlet, even just a short walk or doing some stretching, can help metabolize that extra adrenaline and cortisol. And most importantly, you can practice not adding more threat signals on top of your already overstimulated nervous system. Noticing the anxiety, acknowledging it, and allowing it to sit with you is not giving up. That's actually the most efficient way through anxiety. The next episode of the 18 Minutes is going to be all about riding out a panic attack. So stay tuned for that one. But the big takeaway today is that the goal is not to force calm. The goal is to stop adding fuel to the fire and let the wave of anxiety pass. So to recap, when you can't calm down, it's because your amygdala has fired, your stress hormones are elevated, you're outside your window of tolerance, and your thinking brain is partially offline. You're not broken, you're not weak, you're having a human experience. You are a human with a nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do, just with a little too much enthusiasm. Understanding this stuff genuinely changed my relationship with anxiety because I stopped being scared of the sensations and I started seeing them as information instead of emergencies. And that shift over time is how recovery is possible. 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 amanda at the18minutes.com. And if you haven't grabbed the free recovery guide yet, head to my website and grab that. It's a great companion for everything I talked about today. Thank you so much for being here today, and we'll see you next time.