Dr. Aziz explains why telling yourself to calm down doesn't work: anxiety is a bodily alarm, not a thought problem. Instead, breathe slowly, locate the sensation in your body, and stay with it until the alarm quiets. Then your mind can process the thoughts.
There's one major mistake people make when they're trying to calm their anxiety, which is to talk themselves out of it. They're basically saying, calm down, calm down, calm down. Shockingly, that doesn't work. So here's what you need to do. You need to go from the bottom up, because in anxiety states, there is an alarm going off in your body, and you need to be able to soothe yourself and create a sense of safety within your body. Then you can work with your thoughts and your worried mind. So how do you do that? Take a slow, deep breath in. Bring your attention out of your mind, down into your body, and find the place inside that's pulsing, squeez, unsettled, ungrounded. That feels awful. And actually bring your attention right to the center of the center of it. Take a full breath in and keep staying with that sensation, following it in your body. Stay out of the mind. Go back into the body. Keep tracking that sensation in your body. Within several minutes, you will find you will feel a shift. The alarm is received. Then you can look at your mind, you can work with your thoughts, you can do all that other stuff that can help you release the fear.
