How to Stop a Panic Attack: What Actually Helps

Hello friends! This solo episode from Cassandra covers panic attacks — what's actually happening in the brain, why they're not coming from nowhere, the difference between anxiety and a panic attack, and exactly what to put in a panic attack bag to physically ground yourself in the moment. Cassandra is a licensed therapist and EMDR Consultant at Seen Therapy Services in Springfield, Missouri, offering EMDR therapy, EMDR intensives, and couples counseling in person and via telehealth throughout Missouri. Visit seentherapy.org or call/text 417-708-7909 to get started. Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen, give us a follow, share, or five star review. Have a good one!

"Do not try to verbally reason with someone in the middle of a panic attack. Would you walk up to a gazelle being chased by a lion and tell it to calm down? No. We are going to physically ground them instead."

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello, hello friends. Welcome to the podcast where we simplify everything about mental health. Just kidding. But here's what we are gonna do. We're gonna sit down together, a licensed mental health professional, that's me, and a regular old Joe, as my husband Garth would describe himself. We're gonna talk about the nitty-gritty of the MBR, some nervous system mapping, how couples can help each other heal, what's healthy parenting actually look like, maybe a little bit of good old banter mixed in. All with the goal of making mental health a little bit simpler for you. Quick note, because my lawyer says that I have to. I'm a therapist, but not your therapist, unless I am. Even if I am, this is still just a podcast, okay? Now have a good listen. Hello, hello, hello, folks. It is just me today, another solo episode. I do have a cough drop in. We're dealing with a little bit of scratchy throat here in the Minnick house. Garth, again, is not here, but he would want me to bant. So, what are we banting about today? Since it's relevant, we're talking about a little bit of an obsession that we have, and that is Ricola cough drops. So many sponsors that could really just fully embrace our family because we are walking billboards for things. We talk about the stuff we love all the time. You guys know I'm a huge Olipop fan. Got my Recola cough drops, hydro jug, huge fan. Like I could grab 10 more things. I don't feel like we're like huge consumers, but when we love something, we go all in. I think that's just that's our story in general. But anyway, alright. I didn't tell you what we were talking about today, so what are we talking about today? Per audience request, we are talking about panic attacks. And goodness. Whoa. If you are watching video, you just got confirmation that I'm an ugly cougher. Or at least I do ugly coughing. I don't want to call myself ugly. I do ugly coughing. That's for sure. Alright, back to panic attacks. So, the thing about panic attacks is they can be really scary for people, and there are really specific solutions for them. Now, before we get into what to do about panic attacks, I want to be clear that panic attacks can mimic symptoms that would come along with a cardiac event. If you are wondering, am I having a panic attack? Am I experiencing a cardiac event? Go get checked out. Just do it. Okay. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be fine. Go get checked out. Alright. And once you are panic attacks, here's what first. We're going to have an understanding of what's actually going on. So let me tell you. The good ol' amygdala. It's got a lot of responsibility. We can't blame her for everything. She's she's holding a lot. Okay? Sometimes she detects a threat when there is not one. She thinks something scary is going on. And like something inside our brain and body is scary. But there's nothing around us that's actually scary. But she can't tell the difference. And so she sounds all of the alarms. And the body goes into survival mode. And it should. She told it that it was gonna die. So it should. And it does. And there we are, thinking we're dying. So that's rough. Okay. Here's another thing I want us to consider. A lot of my clients will say to me, it seems like these panic attacks are just coming out of nowhere. They are not. One of two things is happening. Maybe both. Oftentimes both. There has been a slow buildup that has led to this eruption of a stress response. Okay? That's probably happening. Here's another thing that's probably happening. You have been subconsciously triggered, even though you're not consciously triggered. Okay. It can be something simple, as simple as the color of a street sign. And you can't really tell me exactly why that street sign made you so uncomfortable and then led to heavy, difficult breathing, but it did. And we will get to the bottom of it. Okay. So one, things are slowly building up, and two, things are happening subconsciously that you're not even aware of that are triggering you. Okay, so we are going to forgive the amygdala for what she has done. And then we are going to acknowledge that this isn't happening for no reason. All right. Those are the first two things. Why is a panic attack different than general anxiety? Okay, so we're stepping away from clinical terms here, but just general anxiety is going around. And it's more of like it's a question, right? Is something bad going to happen? Feels like it could. At any moment. Panic attack is like something bad happened. I thought I might scream, my kids are sleeping, so I'm not gonna do that. Panic attack is explosive. It is not the questioning when is something bad is going to happen. It feels like something bad is going to happen. It is something bad happened, we are dying. Okay. So that's the difference. Anxiety kind of gets that system ready to rev up as soon as it needs to. Panic attack is that system as revved up as it possibly can be. Alright. So we're gonna be mindful of that. Okay. Then how do we practically respond to a panic attack? Well, if you're a client of mine, you're gonna have a panic attack bag if you experience panic attacks. And here's what you're gonna have in your panic attack bag. You're gonna have things that focus on grounding because when we are working with somebody who has experienced panic attacks, whether we're working with them professionally or we're trying to help somebody that we love, or we've experienced panic attacks, we want to focus on physical, what were the words I put earlier? I think they were really good. Physical grounding versus verbal reasoning. Physical grounding versus verbal reasoning. We are not going to try to verbally reason with someone who is in the middle of a panic attack. It is not going to work. Would you walk up to the gazelle being chased by the lion and tell it to calm down? No. No. Run faster, gazelle. If you're gonna talk to them, I I don't know. Like, I don't know in what world it would be helpful to be like, you think you're dying. It makes complete sense that you're responding this way. Keep it up, right? Like keep running. I I don't know. I don't let's not do that. So we're not gonna try to verbally reason with somebody that's having a panic attack. We are going to work on physically grounding them. How do we do that? In our panic attack bag, we're gonna have something they can smell. We want this to be obnoxious. We're thinking Vic's vapor rug rub. We're thinking Carmax, right? We're thinking tea tree oil, we're thinking peppermint. We are thinking things that have a very, very strong smell. Not necessarily what calms them down. In fact, we don't really want a scent that calms them down. We want a scent that engages them. We can have some sound stuff, whether that be like a playlist that they listen to, or even like a little noisemaker. Sound, I've seen like iffy results from smell is a solid one. Here's another solid one: having something that our body has to respond to. Now, this could be a game on your phone, but I like to keep things simple and low tech in the middle of a panic attack. So I tell my clients to put some sort of ball in their panic attack bag. It can be a stress ball, it can be a bouncy ball. I want them to also put directions in their panic attack bag, and those directions, amongst other things, they're going to tell them to start by tossing the ball against the wall, to toss the ball back and forth between their hands, to toss the ball in the air with their non-dominant hand and catch it with their non-dominant hand. We're increasing our engagement, right? We're asking the body to do more, more, more, to be responsive to more and more and more. We are demonstrating to the body that it is present in a safe environment. It is not facing an immediate threat anymore. Okay. So there are lots of other things that we can put in our panic attack bag. I'll name one more. Really sour candy works in the same way as kind of obnoxious smell. So taste and smell, and then kinesthetic, you know, so like movement, those are gonna be the biggest bangs for our box with panic attack bags. It's not that we can't put other things in panic attack bags. We can, but that is where I've seen the most results. So happy to walk through that a little bit more. If you have experienced a panic attack and you want to come seek some treatment for that, we can talk about what to put in your panic attack bag, but that will at least get you started. Okay. I had said in a previous episode, it wasn't specifically on panic attacks, it was journalized anxiety. There are so many creative things that we can do now. You can make a QR code to put in your panic attack bag that will automatically, when you scan it, populate a text to send to your best friend saying you're having a panic attack, or bring up a, you know, a playlist, or even bring up an audio of you explaining to yourself what to do when you're having a panic attack. I haven't had a client do that one yet, but I think I'm gonna encourage somebody to. You could literally put a QR code in your panic attack bag, you scan it, right? It says scan me on it, you scan it, and you could pre-record you walking yourself through directions for your panic attack bag. I love that. Somebody do that and tell me about it. That sounds so wonderful. Okay, so here's what I want to wrap up with. Guys, when I'm solo episode episoding, I just made that a verb. Don't tell Garth, but like dang. We're at 11 and a half minutes. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but we're getting it done over here. Okay. So how I want to wrap up panic attacks. They're scary, and there are very practical solutions to them. Twofold, right? Scary stuff, also very practical solutions. One thing I did not mention, if you're watching this video, I am so sorry. I have now coughed and itched my nose like 10 times. I am not a prescriber. I will not be discussing specific prescriptions. However, if you have been trying to manage panic attacks without a prescription and you have experienced five or more panic attacks in the past year, I would really encourage you to go see a prescribing provider and discuss that with them because there is some neuroplasticity that's going to work not in our favor here. And we are going to, it's going to start getting easier and easier to have panic attacks at some point. So I will slip that in before we wrap up. Again, final note panic attack, panic attacks are scary, and there are also really tangible practical solutions to resolving panic attacks. So I understand that they they're big and they elicit big responses from you know people that see them happening because of that. And also they can be really manageable. All right. Thank you guys. Appreciate your listen. As always, I'll talk to you soon. Well, that's all, folks. Please see our show notes for ways to connect with us or go give us a follow on Instagram. You can find us at Simply Mintal. If this episode resonated with you, send it over to a friend. Give us a five star rating, subscribe, download all the things the cool kids are doing these days. Thanks for having me listen.