Comment by timrichard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timrichard | Hacker News Reader

From personal experience, years ago : learning to control your breathing is the key. Your fear of the symptoms can turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you've deeply internalised the assurance that you can defeat the symptoms any time you like by regulated breathing, you might well find like I did that they just stop happening quite naturally. It takes time and practice. Sometimes now when I find myself in stressful situations, I notice my breathing has switched over to this pattern without any deliberate intervention from me. Must be the practice.

There are many techniques out there (such as the 7-11 pattern, etc). I'd recommend practicing with any wristwatch or clock that has a ticking second hand. Breathe through the nose and not the mouth. In for five, out slowly for ten, repeat until comfortable. If you're not immediately able to do that, try holding your breath until you can begin. It's a great trick and general mental clarity hack to have in reserve.

Wow, I wish I'd read this thread a year or two ago. I'm in my early 40's, and I had a couple of panic attacks last year for the first time in my life. For the first one I was driving and had to pull over and walk around in a strange neighborhood because I was convinced if I stopped physically moving I'd die. The second time happened at work, and I got a friend to drive me to the emergency room, having tunnel vision and difficulty breathing the entire time.

Here's my epiphany though: When I got to the emergency room, they just laid me down in a bed for monitoring, and after a few minutes (and about $1k) it went away. Since then, in the couple of times I've felt it coming on again I've just told myself that if it happens I'll find a place to lie down and relax until it passes. I haven't had to actually do that, because just the idea that I can is enough to make it go away. (YMMV, but it works for me.)

Good! Now there is also the question where are these coming from? A part of you is at a tipping point. You can ignore this message and find chemicals or methods to distract or you can face yourself now and accept the growth that is going to happen.

The breathing in and out by counts thing frustrated me for a long time. It didn't help calm me at all, but the advice is everywhere.

I can easily shallow breathe into my chest all day long. That doesn't fix anxiety.

You need to breathe into your belly. Watch your belly rise and fall with each breath.

It works, but in my case it only works while I'm actively focusing on breathing, which isn't super helpful. As soon as I want to start thinking about the core problem again, my autonomic systems revert to the original problematic breathing pattern.

Instead, you have to address the core problem. The only long-term solutions seem to be:

1. Rationalizing away the core problem that's making you scared. If you're anxious that you're not achieving your goal, you can decide that's not a goal anymore.

2. Solving the problem.

Neither of these solutions are paint-by-numbers. Life is hard. Solving hard problems is hard. If you're a high motivation person and you set your goals to be aspirational, you may just have to live with the discomfort of anxiety.

The mind is always afraid and anxious. It is what it does, finds problems. By focusing the mind on problems you will get more problems.

Your body knows how to calm down. It knows how to unravel that stored emotion and feeling. You only need to allow it to come out. Breathing and observing the breath is the first step of accepting your experience. You can never get rid of your emotions - you can only accept, allow or resist and suffer.

Found that to be true as well, which is the reason I got a semicolon tattooed on my forearm. The semicolon represents `Just breathe` for me. I got the idea from an instagram post I saw and after researching a bit I found Project Semicolon which is a mental health and suicide prevention project.

projectsemicolon[dot]com

This works unless your anxiety is being triggered by the vagus nerve in which case deep breathing only makes it worse. Had one related to an illness recently, the vagus nerve makes you feel like you are having terrible anxiety that is made worse at the apex of every in/out breath. Then when you can't breathe deeply you start having even worse anxiety. This is the problem I am dealing with atm.

I also had a mind/body anxiety snafu. I was experiencing that crushed chest anxiety sensation without any emotional triggers.

Turns out I had a pinched nerve in my spine. The pain and nerve stuff caused my body anxiety sensation, which then caused the emotional anxiety.

Resolved with a lumbar fusion.

Which explains why most of my prior efforts to mitigate weren't effective (drugs, meditation, exercise, sleep hygiene).

Having gone through years of this during my university years I agree here. The general notion of 'controlling' anxiety attacks can be problematic.

Once your body is full of adrenaline it takes 10 to 15 minutes to physically calm down, there's no shortcut, and often trying to suppress the physical symptoms keeps the cycle going.

What generally works much better is to simply accept that your body is going mad for a few minutes, it's million years old biological systems you don't have any control over, fighting them isn't possible. Keeping a detached mind, breathing normally and remembering that panic attacks don't kill you (the racing thoughts are often the worst thing) helps immensely.

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