Calming Strategies for Panic Disorder

Your Breath Never Gets All the Way In

Your mouth is open, and the air moves fast and shallow across the top of your chest.

It never gets all the way down.

Your heart catches on before your mind does, and the room slides back a few feet, taking the exits with it.

Trapped is one word for it, and powerless is the one that comes next.

Then You Decide You’re Doing It Wrong

Somewhere in there you land on an explanation: you must be doing something wrong.

The self-judgment arrives, the negative self-talk follows it in, and the two of them manufacture more anxiety than you started with.

It escalates from there into phobias, and into panic attacks that keep their own schedule.

So you skip the party, take a different route, build a small ritual that holds the line for an afternoon, and tell yourself the whole thing will pass on its own.

Nothing You’ve Tried Releases the Pressure

Someone has told you to breathe before, and they said it in a way that made it sound small.

Your body’s automatic survival system is doing exactly what it was built to do, at a volume nobody can live at, and your brain feels like it’s going to explode.

In my practice I keep finding the same thing: mouth breathers and shallow breathers, conditioned into a way of breathing that nobody chose.

You were wired at birth to take air in through your nose, and somewhere after language arrived, that got interrupted.

Teach Your Body the Difference Between Tension and Release

Breathe the interrupted way long enough and it drives the release of the stress hormone that feeds your anxiety and your panic episodes. The hormone raises the anxiety, the anxiety pulls your breath higher into your chest, and the higher breath sends the hormone up again.

Progressive relaxation has been in my practice for three decades, and it works by tensing one muscle group, letting it go, then moving to the next.

You learn the difference between the tension you’re making and the release that follows, until your body can tell you which one it’s in.

Around that we build the rest: breathing, light tapping on points on your face and hands, visualization that walks your brain back to a time it felt good in your body, and skills for diverting, relieving and shifting what comes.

Build Yourself an Internal Dimmer Switch

Usually I can help people mitigate panic within five to seven sessions of somatic and calming work, and the skills go home with you between appointments.

Then the air goes in through your nose, all the way down, without you deciding to make it.

The room stays where it is, and so do the exits.

What you’ll have is an internal dimmer switch, and your hand is the one on it.

Start With a Simple Conversation

The next step is a consultation, and it’s free.

We’ll talk plainly about a path forward for you that’s attainable and sustainable.

Find me through my Psychology Today listing, write to Lcphd@hushmail.com, or call and leave a voicemail, since my phone hangs up on silence.

Bring me the breath you’ve been holding, and we’ll start there.