Anxiety Attack? Here’s How Your Brain Reacts and What to Do About It

You’re walking along and, suddenly, you can feel your chest tighten and your shoulders flex. You don’t know what caused it you just feel like it’s a living hell and you can’t escape.  The harder you try the deeper you sink until panic sets in.

More and more I see patients with these issues.  Stress can lead to anxiety, and anxiety to panic at times. Often, it may be something seemingly simple like a scent that triggers you.  Or maybe a color, or a sound or feeling.  Sometimes you can’t figure out what it is.  Here’s the thing…..you don’t have to stay in that space, but you can’t think your way out.  You must release your thoughts and breathe so that your mind has the ability reset.

Here’s what happens in your brain when you’re triggered…the thinking part shuts down.  Fear drives us into the limbic brain (that’s in the middle about where your temple is) and is responsible for shutting down the thinking, speaking, logical brain  (known as the cerebral cortex, it’s the top and front portion of your brain).  When the limbic brain senses danger of any kind (or simply something it doesn’t understand) it assumes danger and flips on.  As much as it might love having the prefrontal cortex around it takes 6 seconds to make a decision and that’s too long.  So the limbic system flips a switch and you can’t think logically any more.  At that point we freeze and then decide whether to stay frozen, run, or fight.  That takes 0.2 seconds, much better if there actually is a tiger there.  Not helpful in Wal-Mart.

That’s why we therapists teach grounding exercises.  Here’s one I created long ago for myself:

• Take two deep breathes in through your nose and out through your mouth (If possible during allergy season)
• Then look around you and say quietly to yourself 3 things you can see.
• Two more deep breaths
• Pick a sense, what you can feel, hear, etc. and say quietly again 3 things you sense.
• Finally, two deep cleansing breaths

I’ve not known a time that this has not worked.  Sometimes it need to be repeated over if the anxiety comes on quickly but it does work.

Here’s why it works. Our minds cannot inhabit two time-spaces at once. Multitasking is a myth. What we do is bounce from one place to another and integrate the information…we microtask. Anxiety is always about our fear of the future or the past and when we do this exercise we ground ourselves in the here and now. Try it sometime, it works.

WARNING: THIS WILL NOT WORK IF THERE ACTUALLY IS A LARGE CARNIVORE BEHIND YOU.

In the next article we will discuss PTSD….how and why it happens and what we can do about it.

Robert Cox lives in Excelsior Springs and counsels through Life Recovery Consulting of Liberty, MO. For more information contact Robert by email or learn more on his website.