I’m something of an expert at completely freaking out. My entire existence has essentially been one long anxiety attack punctuated by smaller anxiety attacks, and it all sucks. I’ve had anxiety attacks during all manner of things—at school, at work, while sleeping, while driving, while having sex, at the dentist’s office, at my high school graduation, at Lollapalooza, and on, and on.
Anxiety doesn’t really lie dormant when you’re not having a full blown anxiety attack. It colors the things you do and the way you act. It’s always there, and you always live in the fear that you might start having an anxiety attack, so eventually you have an anxiety attack about whether or not you’re going to have an anxiety attack…
Yeah. Never ends.
I’ve had a lot of time in the last 21 years to develop ways to cope with anxiety attacks and various other kinds of anxious feelings. If you’re struggling with diagnosed or even undiagnosed feelings of anxiety, this might help you. It works almost as effectively for me as taking Klonopin does, and you don’t even have to become dependent on prescription medication to try it out!
The first thing I tell anyone in the middle of an anxiety attack is to take a deep breath. A lot of the physical symptoms of anxiety make it difficult to breathe, and it’s the nature of anxiety to make you take lots of short, desperate breaths. This is bad. You don’t want to start hyperventilating. That’s how you end up passing out. Breathing is the first step to getting it to a manageable level, particularly if you can’t isolate and remove the trigger of your anxiety.
4-7-8 breathing is something I learned in therapy. It’s simple.
First, you exhale.
Then you close your mouth and breath in through your nose for 4 seconds. Count it in your head. It might be hard for you to get the counts right or your breathing even in your first few tries, especially if you’re nervous/shaking/crying, but that’s okay. Keep trying.
Next, you hold that breath in for 7 seconds. Count in your head. If repetition comforts you, tap your finger or your fist against your thigh to count.
Last, exhale through your mouth for 8 seconds. Try to do it steadily and not in one rushing gasp, or you’ll run out of breath and mess up your count.
That is all one breath. Do it and do it again. 4-7-8. In through your nose, hold, out through your mouth. Holding the breath in your body for so long lets it circulate through your body and helps relax you. I didn’t make this up. It may seem like arbitrary numbers, but I promise you that this helps. There’s science behind it, or something. Personally, when I’m having an attack, science doesn’t mean shit, so I won’t go on about that. It’s also just generally relaxing and also used as a technique to help people who have trouble falling asleep.
Breath in 4, hold 7, exhale 8.
You're all better now.
Just kidding, you still have a terrible disorder which will probably never relinquish its grasp on your vulnerable innards. But anyway.
