3 Easy Tricks to Blast Your Anxiety Attacks When You’ve Had Enough

They work for me when nothing else will.

“Just relax. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

“Breathe. Keep breathing.”

Have you heard these phrases? They’re pretty common in the realm of mental health, especially when trying to cope with anxiety attacks as they happen.

While those things are valid and work for some folks, others — such as myself — need something a little extra.

“You need to get some more sleep” doesn’t mean diddly when you’re immersed in a full-on panic mode. “Eat well-balanced meals?” Sure. That’s great, but I’m feeling like I’m having a heart attack here, Mister Guru. Can you give me something more immediate?

Meditation is fine to get you through, but I’ve never been able to meditate a lick in my life and don’t expect to soon. Breathing works, I suppose, but when my attacks come on, the last thing I can concentrate on is how fast I’m taking breaths.

Let me give you three simple tricks I’ve used with success over the years to quell that monster inside.

It’s crazy voice time!

I’ve lived with the axiom that you cannot fight energy with the same kind of energy.

You have to hit it back with something of the opposite. Hate doesn’t make hate go away. It takes love, sometimes powerful versions of it, to counter hateful people and ideologies.

The same happens for me with anxiety. I can’t breathe through it, because then I start hyperventilating and freaking out even more.

So, it’s time for a crazy voice.

When I am in the midst of it, I’ll pop out with a weird demonic kind of voice, which at any other time I find hilarious to do.

“Tomatoes!” I’ll shout with this deep, horrendous gasp.

Sure, it sounds like the creature from the blue lagoon on a ventilator, but it definitely makes my body do some opposite actions. That’s the point. You do something so out of sorts with your voice that it shocks your system.

If you do it with some weird word that doesn’t fit into the situation in any way (see tomatoes above) it works even better. The brain is surprised, wondering where the hell that came from.

Crazy voice. Works darn near every time for me.

Play the mimic.

There’s a common concept in therapy circles known as the “3 3 3” rule, or rule of threes.

The idea of it is this: First, look around and name 3 things you see. Then you want to do the same for 3 unique sounds going on around you. Lastly, take 3 deep breaths and let them out slowly.

This can work, but sometimes when I am in the middle of a really severe attack, I can’t think straight enough to even notice 3 separate things going on around me. Plus, being a blind guy, trying to “see” three different things while my eyes are steaming with tears and trying to keep myself from passing out is not going to happen.

The sounds thing, though? That’s doable.

Instead of naming the three sounds coming into my ears, though, I like to mimic the sounds.

It’s guttural. It’s instinctive. Shoot, most of us made weird sounds all the time as kids.

It’s not that much different in this case.

I have a box fan going on in my room at all times. I can’t relax without the thing is on, so it’s always active come winter or summer.

That’s an easy one to make the sound of. My cats are usually around the room, too, so I’ll do a little meow or purr sound. If it gets their attention, so much the better. They’ll usually come to investigate what the nutty human is attempting to do, for the bonus wins.

Touch the familiar.

This one takes a small amount of preparation ahead of time.

It’s based on the idea of lucid dreaming. You know what that is, right? That’s when you try to control what happens in a dream because you recognize, though you’re asleep, that you actually are asleep and dreaming.

A method some people use to foster lucid dreaming is to touch the sill of a doorway every time they walk through it.

For instance, if you go into a bathroom, touch the sill as you go in. Walking into the house from outside? Touch the surrounding area.

Do it enough so it becomes something of an instinct, constantly touching every door you pass by.

What they claim happens is that if you are in a dream and there’s a doorway in it, you’re going to touch it out of habit. That will “pop you into knowing” you’re actually in a dream, thereby giving you the chance to control it.

What does this have to do with an anxiety attack, you ask? I’m getting there!

If you take this same idea outside of the dreaming arena, you can make use of the habituation to help you get through an attack.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a door, but any familiar object or thing can do the trick. I use a door because we have a bathroom in our bedroom and I have easy access to it.

Most rooms and houses have lots of doors, and every place you will go to likely does, as well. That makes the door concept an easy one to fulfil.

Keep touching those doors in the calm times and, strangely, when you do it during an attack, it can help ground you to reality. Your body and brain will have this sort of subconscious recall of calmness you felt before with that same action.

It’s odd, but it works for me.

A bonus to this one is that it is a silly sort of thing to do when you’re in the middle of trying to survive a full-on panic attack. The surrealism of it alone might jar the engine to take a different direction.

Don’t feed the beast. Defeat it.

It’s hard to get through an attack. I know the pain all too well, my friend.

Sometimes they come on out of nowhere, with no understandable trigger to get that demon going. It’s horrible, it’s embarrassing, and it always feels like this thing is never going to end.

But it does. You know it does because you’re there right now. You’ve survived them all, defeating the beast of burden no matter how many times it’s tried to rear its ugly little head.

That is, perhaps, the most important thing to keep in mind. You’re a survivor, and it will not beat you the next time, either.

Now, get your best crazy voice ready, touch those doors, and start making wild goat sounds at random.

Don’t be afraid. You’re more powerful than you think.

About me:

I am an author with over a dozen books and dozens of short stories published. I have experience with both traditional and self-publishing and love to discuss the pros and cons of both.

Why do I write? Because I am blind and live on low disability payments each month. The government graced me with trying to live on about $700 per month, and I decided to start publishing because it’s a way to supplement.

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