This 1 Simple Trick Can Stop A Panic Attack In Its Tracks

Panic attacks are no joke: They involve overwhelming feelings of fear or anxiety that are often coupled with physical symptoms like chest pains, nausea, sweating, chills, and difficulty breathing. They can come on suddenly, and be terrifyingly debilitating.

So what do we do if we feel panic taking over? And how can we end these events as quickly as possible?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Charles Schaeffer, a psychologist, adjunct professor at New York University, and author of “When Panic Happens,” when he recently visited our studio.

Press play to hear the full episode:

“[With panic], a part of your nervous system misfires and sends out an emergency signal, and it just flails out to the rest of your system,” Schaeffer told us. “In the book, I talk about [panic] being like a blue shell. No matter what you’re doing in ‘Mario Kart,’ when you see that blue shell, what’s about to happen? No matter where you are in the race, what’s gonna happen? You’re going to be taken out. And so panic often does the same thing to your nervous system.”

In order to prevent panic from shutting us down, Schaeffer recommends finding ways to distract or even reboot our systems, which he says are ultimately primal and relatively simplistic.

“We think we’re sophisticated machinery — we aren’t,” he said. “We’re very chatty apes. That’s basically it. But a lot of that software underneath is just like mammals, and that’s pretty old. That’s not even talky — that’s just sensory stuff. That’s feeling fight or flight.”

If we can divert our minds and bodies away from the panic to some other perceived threat, we can defuse the fear bomb going off inside us. And there’s one