Anxiety can feel sudden and overwhelming, I know, I have been there! Sudden onset symptoms such as racing heart, shaky hands, dizziness can cause panic. General lingering, but not yet panic, symptoms (such as a knot in your stomach or a general sense that something bad is going to happen) are also painful experiences and cause prolonged suffering, distress and agitation. I know many people who think “Why is my body doing this to me?” when this feeling sets in.
And yet, the truth is your body isn’t actually betraying you and it’s not broken. It’s simply trying to protect you. It is doing these things in the service of your survival (as Linda Thai says in her somatic trauma therapy training course which I recently completed).
Your Built-In Safety Radar
Deep inside the brain sits two small, almond-shaped structures called the amygdala. This is essentially your internal smoke detector. Its job is to scan for anything that might signal danger (whether that’s a real threat or not, such as a work email or a sound of something falling in your basement).
When the amygdala senses trouble, it sends an urgent message to another area of the brain: the hypothalamus, which flips on the “fight-or-flight” switch and sets your body into “survival mode” (again the service of survival) setting of a cascade of events to better support your survival.
From Brain to Body: The Adrenal Connection
The hypothalamus alerts your adrenal glands, perched on top of your kidneys. In a split second they release adrenaline (also called epinephrine) and later cortisol. These chemicals prepare you to act, move, run, fight or freeze efficiently:
Heart rate and breathing speed up to move oxygen to your muscles which can feel like a racing and/or loud strong heart beat that is hard to ignore. This so that your muscles are primed to defend yourself from a threat.
Blood flow shifts away from digestion and fine motor limbs such as extremities toward large muscles which can cause tingling in your hands and feet, stomach upset, nausea and more. This is so that you can use your muscles more effectively to fight a dangerous threat.
Senses sharpen: your pupils widen, hearing becomes more acute. This can cause a sensation of “tunnel vision”
Breathing gets fast, shallow and short. This can cause dizziness and feeling faint and even numbness in your fingers and toes and mouth. But the goal of your body is to get more oxygen to your muscles so you can get ready to fight or run with extra strength. Unfortunately it leads to this carbon-dioxide imbalance if you are not moving much (i.e. sitting at a desk) during this process which is what triggers these physical symptoms.
Often, people mis-interpret these internal sensations as a threat themselves, further amplifying the firing of all these mechanisms with thoughts such as “What the heck is happening to me?! I am going to pass out!” and “I am having a heart attack!” and WHALA- we have a full blown panic attack. This chain reaction is what creates the pounding heart, sweaty palms, trembling hands or legs and tight chest many people describe during an anxiety surge.
When the Alarm Misfires
Sometimes (and frequently in those with panic disorder) the amygdala responds to a perceived threat rather than an actual one. That could be a memory, a worry about the future, or even a change in body sensation. Because the body can’t tell the difference, it sends the same cascade of signals.
Gentle Ways to Reset the System
You can’t stop the alarm from ever going off—and you wouldn’t want to (trust me, it can save your life!)—but you can help your body settle once you know you’re safe. Here are therapist-tested grounding practices you can try anywhere:
Engage with the Wave of Anxiety Differently: First, and most importantly: start by accepting that anxiety is a natural emotion. That it’s actually evidence that your survival system is working, not the opposite! Then say, “okay this is just an emotion, it can’t hurt me, it’s just uncomfortable” THEN try proceeding with whatever you were planning to do anyways (as long as it is safe to do so). For example, stay in the grocery store, continue with the presentation, get out of the house to go to work or to the park with your kids. The point is to start to allow the anxiety to be present and go ahead and “do it anyway”.
5-4-3-2-1 Senses Check :Name 5 things you see, 4 things you feel, 3 things you hear, 2 things you smell, 1 thing you taste. This pulls attention to the present moment and signals to the brain that the danger has passed.
Extended Exhale Breathing :Inhale for a slow count of 4 → hold for 7 → exhale for 8 Repeat for 10 cycles at least. Controlled breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and digest” partner to fight-or-flight.
Ground Through Movement: Press your feet into the floor, noticing the texture beneath you. Wiggle your toes or gently sway side to side, reminding your body where it is right now.
Remind yourself, your body is just working, trying to protect you, and the experience will pass. In this space you can catch your thoughts from exacerbating the early stages of an anxiety surge into a full blown panic attack. BUT, remember, the very act of fearing the anxiety itself is what really propels anxiety. So, use these grounding and calming techniques to help you tolerate the anxiety, not to try to make the anxiety go away. Your body needs to learn that nothing terrible happens just because you are experiencing and anxiety wave.
How Therapy Can Help
While self-grounding skills and flipping the script on your anxiety are powerful tools, you don’t have to navigate anxiety alone.
Working with a licensed therapist provides a safe space to explore deeply held (often subconscious) triggers, learn additional coping tools, and gently retrain the nervous system’s response to stress.
Approaches such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), exposure and response prevention (ERP), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), EMDR, or other trauma-informed methods can help reduce the intensity and frequency of anxiety spikes over time.
Therapy can be a great tool for building resilience and finding strategies that fit your life so the body’s alarm system no longer feels overwhelming and no longer interferes with your goals (such as avoiding things you fear will trigger an anxiety or panic attack).
Feel free to reach out for a free exploratory call if you would like to see if therapy could help you reach this goal. Overall, remember, anxiety is a natural part of being a human, but re-working our relationship with that anxiety is a powerful pathway to living our best lives and accomplishing all the things our heart desires.