Why Breathing Techniques Don’t Work for High Anxiety
A few years ago, I was sitting in my counselors office in the middle of my first panic attack, desperately looking for a way to make the symptoms stop. I asked my counselor what to do, and her response was “breathe deeply. That will activate your parasympathetic nervous system so your body can relax.” So I did.
I took one big, deep, cleansing breath, then two, then ten more and… nothing. My body was still radiating with adrenaline, my legs were still shaking, my stomach was still turning, and thoughts of going crazy were still popping into my head every other second. I told this to my counselor and her response was “well… I don’t know what to tell you.” The first time I shared this anecdote with my current therapist, she winced.
So why don’t breathing techniques work to reduce adrenaline during panic and high anxiety? The answer lies in our biology.
Adrenaline is a hormone that, once produced, is sent into our blood and to our organs. Once our body has made adrenaline, the only way it can get rid of it is by putting it to use. This means that our body has to shake and shiver, our stomach has to get tight, and our thoughts have to pop up more quickly as a way for our body to release this hormone, and there’s nothing we can (or should) do to stop it.
Breathing techniques fail us for two reasons.
They don’t get rid of adrenaline.
The mechanisms of the parasympathetic nervous system are much slower and much less powerful than adrenaline.
For these reasons, trying to fight adrenaline with deep breathing is like trying to stop a forest fire with a cup of water - it just doesn’t work.
If we want to truly reduce anxious symptoms, a much more robust and effective solution is to understand why our body produces adrenaline in the first place and how to make it stop. And for that, I refer you to this post.
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