8 Tips to Help with Anxiety and Panic

These tips are for dealing with non-severe anxiety and panic. I am not a mental health professional, only someone who has experience with anxiety and panic attacks.

Some of the tips are from therapists I’ve had, others I’ve acquired from various sources over the years, or things that I’ve tried and work for me.

If your symptoms are severe, I would suggest calling a friend, family member, or health professional. This is more day-to-day management that works for me.

During this isolation time, I’ve realized that being on my phone, or any device, contributes to my anxious feelings.

Tip #1:

–Put your phone or device away immediately.

(I like to move quickly when I feel anxious or panicky, because it can escalate quickly. Catch it as fast as you can.)

Tip #2

–Get up and get moving! Literally get up and start moving your body. Look at your hands and tap them against different parts of your body. Jump, hop, shake, dance, whatever movement works for you. Walk in place or walk back and forth. Don’t stop, move into some other techniques as you relax.

Tip #3

–LOOK around you.  What colors are on the wall? Is there a picture hanging on your wall? What objects are in the picture? Any numbers around you? Read them out loud, backwards and forwards. Are books around? Read the titles out loud.

Tip #4

–Put your nose to work! Burn sage, incense, or spray a fragrant scent (one that you like). Take a moment to really take in that scent.

Tip #5

Look in the mirror (once your anxious feelings have calmed a bit). Look at your face, what color are your eyes? Change the hair style of your hair if you can. Move your hair around. Do you have freckles or birthmarks?

Tip #6

Do a task, any task. Unfolded laundry? Just start folding. Robotically at first if needed. Dishes? Just grab the sponge. Look at the sponge, observe it. Look at the dishes, touch them. Feel their texture.

Tip #7

Go outside if possible, or look out the window. Take a deep breath. Breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, feeling your diaphragm fill up with air. Hold for a second. Exhale slowly through your mouth for 8 seconds. Feel your belly contract as you exhale. Repeat.

Tip #8

As you relax, bring your awareness into the current moment. You are here. Say “I am here. I am right here. I’m here. I’m right here.” You are here, right here. You are here in this moment. This moment is good. This moment is just fine. It’s just here.

If you are currently feeling anxious, please only read the following once you are feeling calm and relaxed.

Anxiety and panic are about disconnection, division. A divergence from the current moment. Your thoughts have been carried away from the present.

In a sense, you are healing the division that is causing your disconnection. That’s why sensory activities are key. It’s not just about relaxing; it is about reconnecting. Touching, seeing, hearing (play music loudly), smelling (burn sage, incense, or use a strong scent or perfume, tasting (I haven’t used this sensory experience with anxiety, but feel free to try).

These sensory experiences and your conscious engagement with them brings you back to the present moment. You realize that here, in this present moment, you are okay. You are intact. Those anxious thoughts were taking you somewhere else, somewhere unpleasant. But you can bring yourself back.

Much love to all who read this. May you feel well and whole.

Here is a link to some professional tips on dealing with anxiety.

Who Am I? [the eternal question.]

I always wondered what I would do with my time if I wasn’t required to be somewhere or do something specific. I would do these exercises years ago where I would pretend I was free of all obligation. I could choose whatever I wanted with my day. It was really hard at first. I was trained to completely escape or “veg” out on my days off.

The days that I worked, I would reluctantly get ready and go work, come home and rest. I incorporated gym time and cooking and errands into my days, but that was it. It was all scheduled, all required.

Eventually something started shifting. I would wake up feeling free, like I was choosing my day. I wasn’t a robot going about my tasks. A new idea was arising, c-h-o-i-c-e. I was choosing my activities instead of feeling the obligation of them. Such a subtle but powerful change in perspective. It made me feel more empowered.

In the past, it seemed as though if nothing was required of me, I would be in bed all day long, every day. I thought I would waste away into nothingness without structure. I realized that was an old way of thinking. The depressed mind. Dissociated, escaping. But that wasn’t me anymore, and I had to update my fears to fit where I was now.

When I let go of obligation, I didn’t turn into a sloth (no offense to sloths). I became more self-disciplined. Self-driven. I started to get to know who I really was and what I was like, without external context.

I wanted to feel my own rhythm. Did I like to wake up early or stay up late? What was my work style? Do I like one long break, or lots of little ones? I never got the chance to understand how I was most effective and what it was like to move through my day with inspiration rather than fear or duty.

When I was young, I was forced to do everything . I wasn’t allowed to have a choice or an opinion. Most of what I came to know as “me” or “my preference” was a rebellious/opposing response to what I had been forced to do. 

So who the heck was I? Without fear of authority or resentful rebellion- what was Heba like?

I started to flow with my own rhythm, after I had disentangled it from shame. It felt so wrong to move with my natural impulses. Like someone, somewhere was yelling at me. It took practice. It took being so nice to myself through the process.

My way of doing things was nothing like what I had been made to do when I was young. And it wasn’t like the stubborn, opposing Heba either.

It takes so much to honor your own flow, but it’s worth it. If ever you want to be free of the machine, you have to understand who you are.

What do you look like without the system imposed upon you? 

I thought about how this time in my life is what I wanted all along. A container, a bubble, where nothing is required of me. The machine has slowed, and stopped in some areas. I had nothing but myself and time. I knew I had to take advantage of it. I had to discover who I was beneath my masks. This wasn’t a time for fear or panic. It was a time of letting go. A time of s-u-s-p-e-n-s-i-o-n. A time like this would not come again.

Here is what I naturally felt inspired to do during this period (so far):

-Developing my business from the inside out. Making sure my intentions are clear and steady and that I have put to bed any fears or doubts.

-Dancing. I’ve not only been practicing my belly dance “moves”, but an overall attitude. Feeling the energy flow through my body and outward as I am dancing.

-Painting. I picked up my watercolors and have been painting regularly.

-Exercising. I’ve been running and weight training (improvised weights), as well as calisthenics.

-I love being outside! I spend every moment outside that I can. I love walking for hours (far away from people) and spending time in our yard.

-Writing. Besides this blog, I’ve been journaling and writing poetry and prose.

-Playing music. I’ve been practicing my djembe and zills.

-Meditating, praying.

Aside from t-h-i-n-g-s I’ve been doing, they also seem to have a natural flow. Some days I feel more physically active, others I can spend writing for hours. I can paint some days and others I ignore my painting completely.

Some days feel so productive and others are soft and quiet. I spend them inside meditating, chanting, chatting with friends or watching tv.

It’s been so enlightening to live day to day without judgement of what I’m doing. It seems I get just as much done in a week moving with my natural rhythm as I would yelling at myself every day to live up to some kind of ideal of productivity.

My days don’t look the same, though I may do the same activities. Each one seems to be unique. Every run I go on looks and feels different. I think it’s because I wake up and I allow myself to listen to my internal impulses. This keeps me in the moment. I’m not running an an old software program; I am more present in each activity.

Something magical happens when you stop pushing. When you push too hard, you push back against yourself and so you have lost your natural impulse. This doesn’t apply to pushing yourself in a particular activity, like running. That’s different. That’s firing yourself up to reach new heights. That’s inspired.

But pushing from a place of fear or inadequacy or judgement is toxic. It makes you imagine as though that will lead you to accomplish your goals, but it’s a lie. Even if/when you do accomplish your goals you will have developed a toxic system for yourself. The ends never justify the means. (This is excluding extreme circumstances.)

What have you learned about yourself during this time? What habits would you like to keep? Did this time feel like syncing back up with yourself?

Passion to Purpose

I embarked on a journey to live by following my heart, to do work that felt fulfilling. I wanted to express my inner world externally in an artistic medium. I wanted a Way, some skills to translate my inner self.

I felt as though I had so much to say, but no language by which to express it. I came to be an artist, a designer, a seamstress. I was passionate about these things. I thought that passion was what I was looking for, but something was missing.

I looked again. I revisited some old wisdom, I found my way to new wisdom.

Deepak Chopra says there are three components of the Law of Dharma.
1. To discover your true self.
2. To express your unique talents.
3. To be in service to humanity/serve your fellow humans

In the guided visualization videos I would listen to at work, they often mentioned the idea of “helping”. How can you help others? What is it that you are offering?

In the business oriented videos I would listen to, they would ask who your audience is. What are they like? What are you providing for them?

I didn’t know how I was in service and I had no idea who my audience was. Others were not factored into my ‘passions’. I was doing what felt inspiring or creative to me, I had no idea how it related to anybody else. I ignored this fact for quite some time. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

This one week, I did a hypnosis guided meditation that compelled me to feel this connection to humanity. Here is what I saw: I was a pack animal and I was sitting in the forest, with my pack. We only communicated with our eyes. We communicated UNITY. I felt something stir within. Some kind of knowing was coming alive. I knew something, but it was so natural to me that I hadn’t looked at it.

The same week, I was listening to Steve Harvey. He said something so incredibly strange and seemingly unimportant. “Your gift is the thing you do the absolute BEST with the LEAST amount of effort.” (I had been looking up videos on the idea of purpose.) He repeated this so many times. I glazed over it until something struck me. I remembered that visualization I had done.

I remembered being in that forest, that feeling that stirred within me. There was in fact something I do the absolute best with virtually no effort at all. It was so innate to me that I had looked right past it-it was too easy.

I felt this natural ability within me to connect. I can connect deeply, intimately with the fabric of our world. It’s just something I do and have always done. I can also s-e-e people, I can see them from the inside out.

When I was very young I knew how to calm people. I would just do it. I knew the pathway from where they were to the feeling of Calm, and I would hold their hand and walk with them there. But I never put words to it, I was too little.

There is something significant in going back to your roots. Going back to the origin of you. All of the masks I tried to wear and the walls I built up around me fell away.

At the basis of my being, who was I? What felt most natural?

Connecting. Swimming around in the energy data of things and people (like a weirdo). Loving, adoring, facing towards the light. When I stripped everything away, that is what remained.

I thought I was going to filter that essence through a medium, through art. In the end, that was a cumbersome and tangled process. I let go. There was a better way, the most basic way.

I was just going to b-e that essence, wholly. It expressed itself after all, I didn’t have to cram it through a meat grinder to see what came out the other side.

I was on a new adventure now. I felt steady. I felt like the wheels of my life had just clicked into place.

How to Stave Off the Crazies [in uncertain times]

The was a spider in my shower just now. I watched as it spun its web and explored my shampoo, conditioner, and shelf of random shower tid-bits. I wondered what it felt like to be a spider. Did it notice me? Was it concerned about the steam starting to envelope the air around it?

It was time to try and remove the spider from my shower. I attempted to scooch it onto several items when suddenly, it fell to the floor. Horrified, I turned off the water and tried to save it from the pool of death it had fallen into. Nothing was working! I ran out of the shower to grab a couple tissues and rushed back to raft Spidey to safety. Things weren’t looking good. I laid the tissues on the bathroom floor and crouched down to assess my new friend’s vitals. There was no movement. Its body was all smushed into itself.

I remembered how resilient insects were. Once, I saved a moth from a glass of water. (By saved I mean I thought it was dead and I was just scooping it out to give it a proper burial.) As soon as I had lifted it from the water, I saw it move a little bit. I grabbed paper towels and laid them under the moth-in hopes they would soak up the excess water. It worked! The moth seemed to rise from the dead and I rushed outside and placed it in a bush.

I wondered if this spider was like my resurrected moth. Insects were resilient.

I left the tissues and went back to showering. Now and again I would peek to see if Spidey had moved. I didn’t see anything.

Carefully, I stepped out of the shower to dry off and kneeled down to check again.

Please be alive. I’m sorry I tried to move you. You can do it. You’re r-e-s-i-l-i-e-n-t. 

I saw movement. I scooped up the tissues and put them into the sink. More movement.

It looked like one of its legs was stuck, or injured.

I grabbed a dry tissue and made a little bridge from the wet ones to see if that would help. It did!

It was alive! Completely intact!

I debated taking him outside. I felt reluctant to make him have to travel after such a harrowing experience. Currently, he is somewhere in my bathroom.

What difference does it make, to save o-n-e spider, this o-n-e time? I can just as easily step on him the next time I go to the bathroom. One of the cats could get him.

What importance does the life of a spider have, when so many die and are reborn so continuously?

I don’t know. I just know I couldn’t let him drown. Not tonight, not in that shower.

I thought about the weeks ahead and wondered what I’ll be doing with myself. I seemed to have done well with this social experiment. I had gained a lot of value from this physical distancing. I learned things from our machine slowing to a soft grind.

I had only completed one part of a three part isolation series. Wtf was I going to do now?

What can you do but go deeper? Even deeper than before.

We seem to have been raised to be part of a machine. What happens when that machine stops? It’s a question many of us are attempting to answer.

And what will happen when the machine restarts? Will our insights hold? Will our civilization truly be changed?

I don’t know. But I know that every day, I’m going to make sure I don’t drown in the bathwater. I’ll raft myself onto dry land. I’ll make bridges of tissues for myself to climb onto when I’m ready.

Who am I with out the machine?

Just a spider trying to build a web. Unsure of what the next moment will bring, but I just focus on weaving. I remember how resilient I am, how resilient we all are.

Origin Point

My steadiness came from having established a very stable relationship with what you might call God, or the universe, or whatever is it that makes this world have a heart beat. (We had traveled a very long, hard road together.)

I would sit in nature, adoring creation. I would look into people and feel happiness and gratitude that they were here. I did this quietly. I praised everywhere and anywhere, everyone and everything that I could.

I think this “sensing” was born of my natural inclination to adore. In my darkest of times, the only thing that ever felt real was adoration. It was always there, unmarred by any life event or inner turmoil. I could sit with a leaf and feel its beauty. I would look up at the sky when I felt hopeless and there, as I admired its vastness, I would become free.

I was devoted to that which breathes life into our existence. I didn’t know a name, I just knew a feeling. It was the same feeling I had always known. When I was little, before dogma and practicality took away the magic, I remember being in union. I felt t-o-g-e-t-h-e-r. Slowly, as life wore on, together had given way to i-n-c-o-m-p-l-e-t-e.

The place where I sensed what things were like “on the inside”. That place felt t-o-g-e-t-h-e-r. We were all their together, it was a place of union. You can’t tell someone anything they don’t already know, but you can help to create an environment where they awaken to their knowing.

I didn’t like the idea of being a psychic, or a medium, or even a tarot reader. There was something else, something that called to me. Something like c-o-m-m-u-n-i-o-n. I remember hearing that word in reference to Christian rituals. I had to look up the definition.

::an act or instance of sharing; intimate fellowship or rapport
::ate 14c., communioun, “participation in something; that which is common to all”

It felt like coming into the place that is “common to us all”. The place where we know each other, where we see each other. Beyond the veils of identity, behind the walls of separation. Somewhere, we all know each other, and this place felt like home. It seemed like people generally wanted to go there, at least for a visit.

At this point, my original idea seemed strikingly more normal. Ah, I’ll just sit quietly with people and smile at them. It seemed more logical than presenting to people, “Hey, want to go on an invisible adventure back to your origin place?”

So who was the light?

I could describe this in a beautiful, fantastical way…or I could take a more grounded approach. Both would be accurate and inaccurate. So I decided to Google the definition of light.

::“the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible.” 

I don’t know if all of my flowery words and long descriptions could have ever yielded an explanation so concise and so fitting.

“The natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible.”

Light, I imagine, coming from the non-space where our collective consciousness resides. That place where whatever keeps us alive is unified, as one breath and one mind.

I wondered who might be interested in this work. Would it be beneficial? Was this something meaningful to offer?

I knew some things for certain. I knew that I was meant for this in a way. This was something that came naturally to me, like it had been there all along. I felt like I had no fear, no doubts or hesitations. It was clear. I didn’t have to try and make myself do it. I didn’t have to swim through oceans of pain and resistance to spend time in that place. I knew the way and I felt connected to this work. It was effortless. It felt like an offering.