As a therapist who specializes in working with anxiety, specifically panic attacks and phobias such as fear of flying, I get frustrated as I scroll through my social media feeds and see endless ads or influencers promoting products or hacks geared toward helping people “eliminate” their anxiety. Whether it’s a guided breathing device, a scent patch, a special kind of gum, a quick vagus nerve technique, or some other fancy wristband or gadget, they often promise to “stop panic in its tracks.”
It’s not that those things are all inherently bad, and perhaps they can help with a certain amount of general anxiety and stress, but in many cases they may actually be contributing to the deeper underlying problem, especially when we’re talking about truly disordered anxiety, where people have started to go to great lengths to avoid feeling anxious at all. These things may also be exploitative of the most vulnerable: those who just want some relief right now without having to do the hard work that’s often required to get better.
Why These Products and Techniques Are So Appealing
When caught in the grip of anxiety, at its worst a full-blown panic attack, most people would do anything to make the feelings go away, or better yet, to prevent the anxiety from ever creeping in to begin with. When the survival system fires off, everything feels wrong. It even feels dangerous. Adrenaline floods the system, and our instincts tell us we must do something to fix it, even when no true threat is present. The option to run, to flee, or to escape isn’t always available (such as on an airplane mid-flight), and we scramble for whatever we can to cope when we have no idea what else to do.
So What’s the Problem?
What’s the harm, you might ask, in having a coping device? A tip or trick to calm down or distract yourself when anxious? Well, again, these things aren’t all necessarily bad, and they’re unlikely in any given isolated situation to cause harm. They may even really help, especially if the anxiety is new or before you’ve figured out how to cope with it effectively on your own. But what they do over the long term is reinforce to your mind and body that you can only be okay under certain conditions or with external support; that you don’t have the internal resources to teach your body that you are safe; and that when anxiety kicks in, there are things you need to do to control it. Paradoxically, it’s often our lack of willingness to experience anxiety, and our need for control over it, that reinforces the anxious cycle. The bells and whistles are not what ultimately build confidence. Confidence comes from learning, through experience, that you can feel anxious, do nothing about it, and still be okay. It comes from teaching your system safety by not treating anxiety as though it were dangerous or something that needs to be controlled or stopped.
A Different Way Forward
If you’re not specialized in this sort of thing, it’s no wonder the answer to how to cope with anxiety, or how to make it go away, can feel so elusive. The body’s instincts, geared toward survival, can really help us when we’re in a true survival situation, but they often fail to tell us what to do when the looming anxiety is either a false alarm or just a general sense that something’s wrong.
The best thing we can do when dealing with anxiety is to begin to really understand it: where it comes from, what its role is in protecting us, and why our body may have started to fire off false alarms even when we’re safe. It means learning about some of the best evidence-based approaches for dealing with anxiety, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Exposure Therapy, which help you start to open up to anxiety versus reacting to it in unhelpful ways that reinforce it (such as by escaping, avoiding, or resisting too strongly). Seek out experienced therapists who specialize in treating anxiety and who are trauma-informed, even when there’s no clearly identifiable past trauma. Although most therapists can help with general anxiety to an extent, those who aren’t knowledgeable at an in-depth level might even recommend some of the things I’ve warned against in this piece, even if they mean well.
As frustrating as it may sound, none of the most sound and reliable approaches rely on gimmicks, quick tips, or methods to make anxiety go away. They involve learning how to be with anxiety differently, teaching your system through your behaviors that anxiety is not unsafe (even when it feels that way). By doing this, we learn that we have the internal resources needed to cope and to build confidence, without relying on external tools that may not always be there when we need them.
Joel Schmidt, MA, LMHC & Qualified Supervisor (Licensed in FL and SC)
Anxiety & Panic Specialist | Helping People Move Past Health Anxiety, Panic Attacks & Fear of Flying | Owner, Float On Counseling