Have you ever had an anxiety attack or panic attack? Your body is going haywire—shaky hands, racing heart, dizziness, nausea—and it feels like there’s no way out. In this post, Emma shares how to stop an anxiety attack in its tracks and how to prevent future anxiety and panic attacks. Read on to learn more about the 3 steps that she calls The Activate Method.
What Does a Panic Attack Feel Like?
Those who have experienced a panic attack or anxiety attack know the trapped and helpless feeling of having your body do unpredictable things. You might feel hot and cold, shaky or tense, nauseous or dizzy, and your breathing or heart rate might be all over the place. Maybe you’re crying. These are all signs that your fight-flight-freeze response has overpowered your emotional regulation system.
And I’ll be honest: when I’m overwhelmed with emotion, deep breathing or trying to “think calm” isn’t my favorite way to manage that wave of panic or anxiety. Let me walk you through what I actually do to calm down and work through an anxiety attack. I call it The Activate Method.
What Not to Do During a Panic Attack
First- there are two things that don’t usually work: trying to force yourself to calm down, or trying to think your way out of this. There’s a time for good thinking later, but in the middle of a panic attack we have to do something with the fight-flight-freeze response, so here’s what you can do in the moment.
Physical Movement to Stop a Panic Attack
You’ve got to burn off those stress chemicals first. The best way to do this is through physical movement, getting a physical release. When I’m feeling overwhelmed by anxiety I usually go for a very brisk walk, but you could do some jumping jacks and pushups, or wall squats in your office. The fight-flight-freeze response has bottled up inside you. Let’s try to burn off some of those stress chemicals so that we can think clearly.
So go ahead, go for a brisk walk, or do a wall sit or a deep squat in your office if you can’t get outside. Whenever possible, do this physical movement until you start to feel yourself calm down a little. You might start to feel a little tired, maybe your heart will slow down, or your breathing will get more steady.
Next, let’s deal with the overwhelm…there’s something bottled up inside of you that needs to come out. And I don’t mean just blow up, or rage or something, research shows that venting anger doesn’t decrease anger over time.
Feeling Overwhelmed by Anxiety
About 17 years ago I was Working wilderness therapy, trying to finish up classes to qualify for grad school. 
I had papers to grade and a test to finish. And I was supposed to be going out for another shift, an 8 day shift, even though I hadn’t even gotten a full break from my last shift. I was constantly working overtime. 8 days in the desert with a group of teenagers is already pretty stressful, but as usual I was being paired with another brand new staff because I had the most experience. Which meant I was basically responsible for everything out there. (Or so my-over-accommodating brain thought).
I kept telling myself, everything’s fine, you got this. While at the same time thinking “How am I ever going to get my homework done?” and “I have to get an A” and thinking “They don’t have enough senior staff if I don’t go out today, I have to go into the field or else I’ll inconvenience them” (Which I considered to be a mortal sin as well). “I can’t ask for help, or else I’m letting them down”.
I was trapped. No matter what I did, I was going to let someone down. So my body responded to all this stress by making me nauseous and dizzy. I thought I was going to throw up, I thought I might pass out. I didn’t actually think that I was feeling anxious. I just thought it was another day in the life of Emma, but now I’m sick. I was so sick that I couldn’t go into the field that day. Work managed to find someone else to rely on – and I got my paper turned in. and suddenly my nausea and dizziness went away.
I realized that all my symptoms were actually an anxiety attack.
What Causes Anxiety Attacks and Panic Attacks?
Usually anxiety attacks happen when a ton of stress builds up over time PAIRED WITH not being able to take action to manage that stress. Every time we feel some stress, that’s a physical response in our body. The fight-flight-freeze response is supposed to defend you against a saber tooth tiger. But when you can’t take a physical action against the feeling of stress, it makes your body buzz with cortisol and adrenaline and those chemicals make your emotions feel like they’re going to explode.
Where panic attacks can seem to come out of the blue, or be triggered by a phobia, anxiety attacks are caused by avoidance and overwhelm, by suppressing emotions. The thoughts that accompany such anxiety might sound like “I shouldn’t feel this way”, “I have to calm down or everyone will notice and that would be catastrophic”, or “I’m so angry, but I have to act nice”.
What makes anxiety worse?
In the saber tooth tiger scenario, this activated response is supposed to trigger an action. But in these regular-day situations, your ancient brain can’t really tell the difference between too many emails and a tiger that you need to run away from. Since internal or social pressure won’t let us run away screaming from an overflowing email inbox, we just try to suppress that reaction. And guess what? Trying to force yourself to calm down can fuel the anxiety cycle. So on top of everything overwhelming your life, you’re accidentally sending the message that your feelings are stressful too!
You might spend months trying to just work harder, just do more, just be tougher or more patient. But you can’t just avoid something over and over and hope that it doesn’t explode later. And that’s also why you can’t usually think your way out of a panic attack. All my thoughts when I was freaking out at the field office just kept focusing on somehow doing more and being perfect, which fueled instead of resolved the problem.
I still recommend exercise to make you feel a little better during a panic attack or anxiety attack, but it doesn’t solve the problem that got you here. You’ve got to learn healthy ways to work through huge emotions.
How to Brain Dump for Anxiety
One of the best ways to work through this huge flood of anxious emotions and thoughts is to make it concrete. Take the internal and make it external. I recommend a brain dump. Write it all down. This is a stream of thought exercise. What you write doesn’t have to make sense. You don’t worry about grammar. Just write it all down.
Research shows it’s best to manually write on a piece of paper or a scratch pad, but sometimes when I’m really overwhelmed, I go for a long walk and just talk into the Notes app on my phone. It all comes out a bit messy, but I’m simultaneously moving my body and dumping all those wild thoughts out of my brain and onto my phone. Usually within 15-30 minutes I’m feeling a lot better.
But we aren’t done, because we also want to prevent panic and anxiety attacks in the future.
How to Prevent Panic Attacks and Anxiety Attacks
The brain dump is an important step toward preventing anxiety attacks. When you’ve calmed down, look at what you just wrote down and let’s see what it can tell you about three things:
- What kind of problems are fueling your anxiety?
- What action do you wish you could take, but you haven’t. What is stopping you? What beliefs are you holding that are stopping you from taking action?
- Can you identify one action item, one problem that you can actually solve?
You might be able to make a huge list of problems, and if that makes you feel better, go for it. In the end, you need to take that list and identify one to three action items–no more than that.
When you know the action you will take to resolve this anxiety-triggering problem, write it on a post-it note. The action might be sitting down and doing your taxes, or having a difficult conversation, or setting a boundary in a relationship, or saying no to so many commitments.
Problem Solving to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety
This is how we stop the anxiety cycle. When we perceive a situation to be dangerous, whether that’s a tiger or speaking up at work, our brain triggers the anxiety response. But when we take action to resolve that problem, our brain will trigger the parasympathetic response to calm down our body.
If I had developed the Activation Method for managing anxiety attacks when I was in school and working in wilderness therapy, I would have engaged in some physical movement and done a brain dump. And then I would break down my plan like this:
- When I was having an anxiety attack at the field office, the problems that were fueling my anxiety included
- taking on too many responsibilities;
- believing that I couldn’t say no and I could never let people down;
- not scheduling enough time to do my homework.
- The action I wish I could take but I felt like I couldn’t was to say “I can’t go to the field today”. What was stopping me was believing that I couldn’t ask for my own needs to be met, plus a false belief that I was so important that they couldn’t replace me.
- In the end, the action I took was to not go into the field. I stayed home, finished my assignment, took some rest time, and I was ready to go for the next shift. This action helped me learn that it was okay to ask for help; it was the boss’s responsibility, not mine, to make sure that there were enough staff for the week; and the world didn’t end when I couldn’t solve everyone’s problems. That action helped me prevent more anxiety attacks in the future.
Anxiety Recovery Doesn’t Always Happen Overnight
Some problems take a long time to solve. You can’t solve them in an instant.
Let’s say that one of your kids is having behavior issues and is being really disrespectful. To work on this problem, the action item isn’t going to solve the problem immediately because we can’t control other people’s behaviors. You’re going to have to do some education: maybe read some books, take some courses, talk with a parenting expert. You’ll also want to improve your relationship with your child and take time to teach him the right way to act. Maybe you’ll set up a chart to help him be motivated and track his progress.
If a disrespectful child were the problem that was stressing me out, I’d make a list of action items, such as “buy the book Parenting the Explosive Child”, call the school counselor to explore resources, and spend some quality time with my kid today. Those are 3 actionable steps. And I would take action on at least one of them. By clarifying action items and taking one step, you send a message to your nervous system that “We can do this, it’s going to be okay”, and it will start to calm down.
The Activation Method for Stopping an Anxiety Attack
Let’s review the Activation Methos for managing anxiety and panic attacks.
- Burn off those stress chemicals
- Do a brain dump
- Problem solve
- What kind of problems are fueling your anxiety?
- What action do you wish you could take, but you haven’t. What belief is stopping you?
- Identify one action item, one problem that you can actually solve.
I hope you can see how facing your problems and resolving them actually solves the underlying problem of anxiety attacks. Avoidance and suppression leave us feeling trapped and scared until that pressure builds up inside us and our anxiety explodes.
If you do these steps regularly, before your anxiety is overwhelming, you can face and solve problems before they build up to the explosion point. Regular practice of exercise, journaling, and problem solving can really prevent anxiety attacks. And when you do it with a therapist, you can often learn creative ways to solve problems that you didn’t think were possible to solve.
My FREE Course to Stop Panic and Anxiety Attacks
My mini-course titled “How to Stop Panic and Anxiety Attacks” will walk you through the difference between panic and anxiety attacks, the bad advice that fuels panic attacks, and how to break the cycle of panic attacks. A few people share their experiences and how they overcame years of panic and there are three practical walk-throughs for dealing with panic and anxiety in the moment.
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