Ep. 169 How to Calm a Panic Attack with 3 Midlife Coping Skills To Soothe Anxiety Fast

Do you know what to do the moment panic hits?
Panic attacks in midlife can feel terrifying and overwhelming—but they’re not dangerous, and you’re not powerless.
In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. Three science-backed coping skills to calm your body during a panic attack.
2. How to apply these tools in both public and private situations—and why they don’t have to be used perfectly to be effective
3. Two essential steps to support your nervous system after a panic attack so you can recover with care, not self-judgment

This episode will leave you feeling more equipped and less afraid. And don’t forget: your Inner Challenge is to email MJ at mj@mjmurrayvachon.com to receive a free 3-minute guided box breathing audio—your personal panic reset tool you can keep on your phone.
 These are the coping skills you didn’t know you needed—until now.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover the top three science-backed coping skills to treat a panic attack.

Built-in Microphone: 0:07

Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:31

Welcome to the podcast. This week we're focusing on panic attacks. By the end of today's episode, you'll understand what a panic attack is, and if you've had one, trust me, I know you know and you'll learn three simple, effective science-backed coping skills to help you move through the panic. I'll also share two important steps to support your recovery post panic attack, and today my inner challenge is new because panic attacks are so awful. I want you to have a free voice guided breathing technique that you can keep on your phone. Today's inner challenge will give you directions on how I can send that to you. Let's begin with the obvious. What is a panic attack? Panic attacks are sudden surges of intense fear or discomfort, typically reaching a peak within minutes. Symptoms may include erasing, heart, sweating, shaking, a shortness of breath, chest pain, dizziness, or even a sense of detachment from reality. Panic attacks are so intense that I've worked with hundreds of clients who've gone to the ER thinking they were having a heart attack, when in fact it was panic. Clients who've experienced, both have told me the two do feel very similar, but one is dangerous and the other only feels dangerous. Panic attacks are incredibly uncomfortable but not dangerous. Biologically panic attacks stem from your body's fight or flight response. The amygdala, your Brain's Fear Center becomes highly active, sending signals to your body as if you're in real danger, even when you're not. The key to calming a panic attack is signaling safety to your nervous system. To understand how this works, it can help to know a bit about your autonomic nervous system. This system has two branches, the sympathetic nervous system, which gets you ready for action. Think, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms your body down and helps you rest, digest, and recover. During a panic attack, your sympathetic system floods your body with stress hormones, and you go on high alert. Your goal when this flooding happens is to activate the parasympathetic side to bring yourself back into balance. There are two types of panic attacks, those that come on suddenly and those with a more gradual onset. I encourage you to develop a mindset around learning to notice. Name tame and aim your panic. As you do so, I think you're gonna find like many of my clients have over the years, that your abrupt episodes begin to decrease as you begin to learn what your early warning signs of panic are. That often will help you, not always, but often head off a full-blown panic attack. You may want to start by asking, why is this happening, or, how do I stop this forever? But trust me, the better place to begin is with concrete in the moment coping skills. That's what today is about. On Thursday, we'll explore the why more in depth with the goal of reducing or even eliminating your panic attacks altogether. I encourage you to save on your phone step-by-step directions for the coping skills I'm gonna talk about today, and to practice them when you're not in panic. I want you to think of these tools I an EpiPen, something you carry with you just in case. Having that kind of emotional readiness can create a real sense of safety, knowing I have a plan is incredibly empowering. So let's move to the three coping skills that I have taught thousands of my clients over the years. Coping skill number one, box breathing are often known as the 4 4 4 4 method. I love that this breath practice is recommended by Navy Seals. Why do I love that so much? Well, if Navy Seals need ways. To calm their panic, why can't you? This is how you do box breathing. Inhale for four seconds. Hold for four seconds. Exhale for four seconds. Hold for four seconds, and you repeat it until your symptoms begin to ease, so it goes like this. Inhale four, hold four. Exhale four. Hold four. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system signaling you are safe. Think about this in the most simplistic way possible, panic, dysregulate your breathing. And what you do with box breathing is you step in and you take back control in a gentle, measured, planned way, Many people find it helpful to visualize a box while they're doing this. I've even had clients draw a square on their leg as they do this breath practice. Up as you inhale across, hold down, as you exhale across hold. I encourage you to play around with this practice. Let me share with you an example. A client of mine once felt a gradual sense of panic rising During a work meeting, she moved her attention from her panic to her physical body. She grounded her feet on the floor, her arms on the chair, and then she began box breathing. As she counted in her mind, she drew a box on the table in front of her. After a few rounds, her panic subsided and no one in the meeting even noticed. This is the best case scenario. Now let's move to the worst case scenario. You're at the bleachers at one of your children's sporting events. Suddenly your heart races and you begin to sweat and the panic is saying you need to leave. Trust yourself and give yourself permission to walk to your car. As you're walking to your car, you are feeling your feet on the ground and you are actually grounding yourself as you walk. You then begin to do box breathing. Inhale for four, hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. You stay with it until you begin to feel your body settle. You get to your car and you think, oh, I'm feeling a bit better, but I'm gonna ground my whole body on the car and do a few more rounds of breathing. The point of these two examples is this, sometimes you can stay where you're at and reregulate your nervous system. Other times your instinct tells you it's better to get up and leave. I really encourage you to trust yourself. If you feel like you need to leave. Go ahead and leave. You're gonna know. Panic naturally causes you to hold your breath. So regaining control of your breath is the first step. Think of calming your body like using a dimmer switch, not an on off switch. There's rarely an instant off with panic, but these tools will gently bring the intensity of your panic down Let's move to coping skill number two. I call it the sensory shift technique. Or 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. This technique uses all five of your senses to shift your attention away from anxious thoughts and into the present. Panic is usually triggered by something from the past or future, so bringing your body fully into the now can be powerfully calming. Here's how it works. You name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear. Two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. This activates your prefrontal cortex and helps pull you out of fight or flight. Here's an example a client of mine uses while visiting his highly critical father. Feeling the panic coming on. He stepped outside. He said Aloud, I see the fence. I see the mulch. I see an airplane. I see the neighbor's car. Then he touched different textures. The dog's fur, a tree branch water in the bird bath. He finally took a sip from the garden hose. This practice of using your senses to shift your attention into the moment is surprisingly effective. There's no rules, no perfection, just moving your attention on the sensory world. I've had clients open the refrigerator to do this practice or in their car, and they have found a breath mint that was two or three years old. The goal is simple. Turn your attention towards what's real and sensory. Again, Don't worry about perfection. Some of my clients have done 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, and been able to move themselves to a calmer place. The last coping skill I want to share with you is progressive muscle relaxation developed by Dr. Edmund Jacobson. This technique helps interrupt the panic cycle by bringing awareness to your body. I put my own spin on it, and I call it moving from F to A. Who wouldn't rather have an A than an F? I teach it with a simple cue. Tighten your fists, feet, and forehead. Then release by exhaling with the sound. A how to do it. Tighten your fists. Hold 1, 2, 3. Release saying. A tighten your forehead. 1, 2, 3. Release saying A Press your feet into the floor. 1, 2, 3. Release saying, A repeat or move to other body parts if you like. There's no right or wrong way to do this. You can even start with whichever part of the body feels accessible. Practicing this when you're calm, will make it much more intuitive when the panic strikes. I think you've probably noticed that I keep stressing you don't have to do this perfectly. The reason I want to stress this is over the years so many of my clients think if I do this coping skill perfectly, it will make the panic go away sooner. But that puts an added layer of pressure on reregulating your body. The point is this, the panic attack has gotten your body out of a stabilized state. These coping skills are to put them back into a stabilized state, and you're going to be able to do that more effectively if you let go of the idea that they have to be done perfectly. You might even be asking, which tools should I use first? The one that comes to your mind. You can become your own guide. Once you've used these tools to move through a panic attack, it's important to know how to care for yourself afterward because recovery matters just as much as regulation. And that brings me to the last part of our episode. What do you do when a panic attack ends? A panic attack is a big deal. It's put your body and your mind through a lot. Even when it has subsided, your nervous system is still recalibrating. Recovery is key, so it's important that you reregulate with care. You have just had a significant physical and emotional event. Give yourself time to recover. Ask your body, what do I need? This is the aim part of notice name and tame my emotional regulation method that you can listen to in episode 54 when you ask yourself, post panic attack, what do I need? Trust, what arises in your mind? Maybe you need a nap, a walk, a cup of tea, a hug, or sitting quietly with your pet. You'd cancel plans if you had the flu. I think of a panic attack, like the emotional flu. So if you feel like you need to cancel something'cause you don't have the energy, please do. all of this is an act of self-compassion and when you practice aim, you allow your body to complete the emotional cycle. The second thing that can be very helpful after a panic attack is to reflect without judgment and to understand what were the triggers, what were the causes. I don't recommend that you do this while you're in the recovery process, which is why on Thursday we're gonna go deeper into this reflection process and how to use it as a way to eventually say to the panic, thank you for your service, but I no longer need you. Yes, with proper guidance and reflection, you can gain invaluable insights from your panic that help you learn how to care better for yourself. Sound impossible. Tune in on Thursday to find out your inner challenge for the week is to email me at mj@mjmurrayvon.com to receive your free guided box breathing audio, it's your own three minute reset. A calming tool you can use anytime, anywhere. In this episode, you've discovered how panic attacks impact your body and mind, and three grounding techniques to calm your nervous system and recover with compassion. I'll be back on Thursday with a follow-up episode where we focus on understanding the causes of your panic and how doing so can help you heal. Thanks for listening to creating Midlife Calm.