Your body

Breath work goes straight into the body, and for some people that is the problem. If your panic has ever been about not getting enough air, putting your attention on your breathing can set it off rather than settle it.

Asthma, a history of choking or smothering, panic that arrives through the chest: any of these makes the breath a loaded place to put your attention.…

For when you are stuck in shutdown there is a faster practice: short sharp exhales driven from the belly, letting each in breath happen by itself, about twenty of them.

It is meant to rouse, so expect to feel more awake and a little buzzy afterwards rather than calm. Twenty is plenty. Sit down before you start so…

One of the earliest signs that you are drifting out of the present is that your hands and feet go vague. Not numb exactly, just less there.

It tends to happen before you notice you have gone anywhere. If you learn your own version of it, you get an early warning: a chance to press your…

When what is happening inside gets too loud, turn outward. Name what you can see, listen for the furthest sound, press your feet into the floor.

This is not avoidance. The outward senses and the sense of where your body sits both carry information about now, which is exactly what the flooding…

Cold water on your face, especially around the eyes and cheeks, slows things down fast. Splash it, or hold a cold flannel there for half a minute.

This is one of the few things that works when you are too far gone to concentrate on anything. It asks for no skill and no privacy beyond a tap. Lean…

Cross your arms over your chest, hook your thumbs together, and tap your shoulders slowly, left then right. You set the pressure and the speed.

Twenty or thirty seconds is enough to feel something shift, and most people find the breath falls into step with the tapping on its own. Warmth in…

When you are helping someone settle, put the technique in their hands rather than your own. They tap themselves, they set the pressure, they stop when they want to.

Being touched by someone else, even kindly and with permission, asks a lot of a person whose body has been handled badly before. Self-administered…

Trace a square in the air with your finger while you breathe: in for four along the first side, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.

The counting brings the breath down to somewhere between four and six a minute, depending on how fast you count, which is the range most of the heart…

In the thick of it, keep your eyes open and give them something outside you to rest on. A fingertip, a doorframe, the line where the wall meets the ceiling.

Closing your eyes takes away the evidence that you are here and safe, and for some people it lets images in that they were holding off. Most…

Breathe in, then let it out as a sigh you can actually hear. Not a polite one.

The sound is the point. A silent out breath does some of the work, and letting the voice into it adds a bit more, which is probably why sighing turns…

Tap the fleshy side of one hand with the other and say it plainly: even though I am feeling all this in my body right now, I can accept that this is how I am.

You can strip away everything else and this part still stands up. Naming the state and accepting it in the same sentence blocks the second wave, the…

Before you try anything, give your distress a number out of ten. Do the thing. Then give it a number again.

Even a drop from eight to six is worth having, because you were the one who moved it. That is often the more important result: not the two points,…

When you have gone numb rather than frantic, try a long low sound on the out breath. Voo, drawn out until the breath runs out, so your lips and chest buzz with it.

This is for the flat, far away state, not the racing one. The buzz gives you something unmistakable to feel when nothing else is registering, which…

After you have tried something to settle, check: how here do you feel now, compared with before? Do not assume it worked just because it usually does.

This takes ten seconds and does two jobs. It tells you whether that particular thing is worth reaching for again, and it slowly trains you to notice…

Rest one hand on your forehead and the other on your chest. After a few minutes, move the forehead hand down to your belly. Eyes open or closed, whichever you prefer.

Again the instruction is only to notice what goes on between the two hands. That noticing is quietly the training: it is body awareness arriving…

Two senses rarely get named: the one that tells you where your limbs are, and the one that tells you which way is up. Pressing your feet into the floor or slowly turning your head feeds both.

When someone feels unreal, or far away from their own body, these are the channels that have gone quiet. They carry plain information with no feeling…

Keep one strong smell for when you have gone flat, lemon or peppermint, and one soft smell for when you are wound up, something like lavender. Smell asks nothing of you, which is its whole advantage.

Set this up in advance, because the moment you need it is the moment you will not feel like planning. A small bottle in a bag, a sprig in a pocket, a…

For coming down, something sweet taken slowly tends to help more than anything you chew: sipped through a straw, or let dissolve on the tongue. Nobody around you can tell you are doing it.

Slow sucking soothes in a way that goes right back to the first weeks of life, and it is quiet enough to use in a meeting, on a bus, in a waiting…

When you have gone flat and far away, chew something noisy or blow something: pretzels, raw carrot, bubbles, a slow puff at a candle flame. It lifts you without tipping you into panic.

Collapse does not respond to calming, since you are already too far down for that. What helps is work for the jaw and a long active out breath, both…

When attention has nowhere to settle, give it something. A fixed point on the floor, the breath, the shape your hands are making, or the plain feel of the position you are in.

Which one you choose matters more than people expect. Focusing on the breath turns attention inward, and inward is the wrong direction for anyone…

Open your mouth and put on a big obvious fake yawn. More often than not a real one follows, and the soft palate lets go with it.

Yawns are catching, so if you are sitting with someone else one of you starting will usually set off the other. Let it be a proper one: jaw wide,…

Let something out of your throat. A sigh, a groan, a hum, or the word for whatever is stuck, said aloud to an empty room.

It does not have to sound nice and it will not. Most of us learned early to go quiet when upset, so the throat becomes very good at holding. If a…

Closed eyes are optional. If closing them makes you anxious, or the inside of your head gets loud, open them and look around the room.

Name a few things you can see, listen for the furthest sound you can hear, notice any smell in the air. Looking outward like this is a way of…

The first time you slow a rising panic with your own breathing, something changes that no amount of reassurance could have changed. You have evidence now.

Panic runs on the belief that the sensations are in charge and you are not. One demonstration to the contrary is worth more than a hundred…

The first twinge often brings back every previous episode with it, and that dread is not separate from the pain. Fear tightens the muscles and turns the volume up.

Catching the moment is what helps: this is the twinge, and here comes the film of the last three weeks I lost to it. You are not talking yourself out…

Before picking a calming technique, work out which way you are off. Revved up and shut down need opposite things.

Wound up: slow the out breath, lower the lights, less input. Shut down: more input, movement, sound, a change of room. The common mistake is running…

Calm can feel unsafe if you have not had much of it. Take it in small amounts and let it be strange at first.

Grounding exercises sometimes leave people more agitated rather than less, and then they decide they are doing it wrong. Often the truth is that…

When you are far from settled, aim for the next step rather than for calm. Rattled is a real improvement on numb.

There is a rough order to these states: shut down at the bottom, revved up in the middle, settled and connected at the top. Coming back tends to…

Breathing that has gone almost invisible happens in both kinds of stillness, so it will not tell you which one you are looking at. Muscle tone will.

Look at the jaw, the hands, the shoulders, the way the body is being held in the chair. Tight and set is one thing. Slack and heavy is another. You…

Try locking your ankle and holding everything rigid while you balance. You will fall over. The wobble was doing the work.

People who are frightened of losing control often try to hold themselves regulated: clamped, monitoring, allowing no drift. It is exhausting and it…

Breath reaches the settling machinery faster than reasoning does, because it works on a part of the brainstem that does not wait for your opinion.

That is why arguing yourself out of a panic rarely works while six slow breaths often do something. It also explains why breath practice can feel…

Hum a note you like for a few breaths, and try covering your ears with your palms so the sound fills your head.

The vibration carries through your throat and your inner ear, and humming lengthens the out breath for you without any counting. Choose your own note…

Breathe in, then push the air out gently against a closed throat, or against lightly pinched nostrils, for a couple of seconds.

The change of pressure in your chest is what does the work, and two or three rounds are enough to notice something. Keep it gentle. Straining is…

Cold water on your face, particularly at the hairline and around the lips, sets off a reflex that slows the heart. It is one of the few things fast enough to interrupt real panic.

A splash at the sink, a few minutes outside in cold air, or a bowl of cold water if you have one to hand. There is a quieter version for when you…