Licensed clinical social worker Shari B. Kaplan teaches a grounding technique for panic attacks: tighten your abdominal muscles for a count of ten while breathing normally, then release. Follow with two slow nose breaths, visualizing the inhale traveling down your spine to your tailbone and the exhale rising back up and out the top of your head.
How do I manage panic attacks? So if you can start recognizing that fight or flight response and what happens in the body where your heart would be pounding, we know that if you tighten your abdominal muscles and you hold them for a count of 10, and you want to keep breathing normally while you're doing that, and then you release them after 10, and then you breathe nice and gently in through your nose as if the breath is going down your spine to your tailbone and exhaling as it comes back up through your spine and out the top of your head. And you take 2 breaths like that, and that will help to stop the panic or the fight or flight as it's happening.
