 Okay, we're live again. Hey everybody drew here that anxiety guy com with you again from with Billy from anxiety United in the UK Good morning Billy. Hello there We're doing the next in our series. We missed last week. So for those of you who asked where we were we weren't here. Sorry We're next series. Yes life got in the way We're doing a series of videos together a podcast of videos about an article that I wrote many years ago It's kind of an anxiety one-on-one thing and we'll both link the article in our video description or if you're on my website You'll see it and today we're gonna tackle the subject of coping skills and coping techniques And how to use those when you're in the midst of really high anxiety or even panic So it's and and we say this every week, you know, this is a big one. It's a big topic. They're all big topics Yeah, but this this is a big one and most this is the one that I think most people start to ask about Okay, so what can I do and this is where we actually start to talk about what can we do? So let's talk about some coping techniques. Why don't you kick it off? What do you got going on? Okay, so I just a point I've made a few notes and the top note that I've made is that prevention is better than a cure Or a treatment. So if you can put these techniques that we are going to discuss into practice Not when you're feeling crap, but start now start today And hopefully, you know, that was my main takeaway from doing any research Oh, that's really really solid prevention Yeah So the top thing for me was taking useful time out every day or as often as you possibly can and that's not Taking time out and cracking open the cold one with the boys Or sitting playing video games, but taking useful time out stuff like yoga meditation Massage breathing techniques mindfulness, there's so many different things that we can Talk about and go into but those are the main things that I was thinking Considering coming to taking time out. Yeah, that's a really good point. I really like the idea that prevention is better than a cure so Maybe before we get into the actually talking about some coping techniques Maybe we should we should definitely so as you're listening to us Keep that in mind that these skills that we're going to talk about or these things that you can do are things That you have to practice all the time Not just when you're in a panic attack because these are skills that you'll learn just like speaking a foreign language You're learning to ice skate you have to practice them and the second thing and billy and I were talking about before we went live It's really super important to remember that you have to keep an open mind when we talk about these coping techniques Because none of them will stop a panic attack dead in its tracks. This is we're not it's not meant to do that So if you have that adrenaline dump and you are in a panic as we have all have been and we know how that feels You know mindfulness and breathing and things of that nature are designed to limit the intensity and the duration of your panic They're not meant to just stop it dead. None of what we're going to talk about today It's just going to stop your panic attack dead It just there's nothing that does that short of like a star trek shot in the neck that puts you out You know like I'm not aware of that Yeah, so those two things practice all the time even when you're feeling good and Just be realistic about what these these tools are designed to do Right, so if you can learn to to do some of these things you can limit the duration of your panic attack But it's never meant to just stop it dead in its tracks Super important to keep that in mind The key thing that I took from the article I think it's written in the article is that once the adrenaline is in the system. It is You're going through it regardless, right? So whatever you're doing. Exactly, right? Once you have that dead dump the epinephrine adrenaline was in your bloodstream. It just is now. It's just chemical It's going to have to run its course and you're going to feel the way you're going to feel physically That's just the way it is But You know It seems to be conventional wisdom is if you don't add more fear and you don't add to the cycle You know, you're talking about anywhere from some people as little as five minutes up to maybe 12 to 15 minutes You know and and it begins to dissipate the human body is not designed to just continually be at that high state So what we're going to talk about today is ways to Short-circuit that fear cycle and just let the adrenaline dump run its course and then you'll begin to feel better quickly So that's what we're going to talk about today And these these things are general life techniques as well. They're not just things for coping during panic. Are they the The things that we should really Yes, I'm permitting do as often as possible anyway That's very true. And when you hear people talk about things like stress Stress management or anger management or just general mental health well-being spiritual well-building. These are good things to just know how to do And I will tell you that learning and not my big one is kind of that Quieting the mind thing. I'll talk about that as we go But that has been a skill that I learned to help me get through panic attacks But that serves me every single day every day and we'll talk about why so let's talk about some Like what are your favorite coping techniques? What are the things that you do? My list, do you know what I'm pretty useless when it comes to I'm dead set on safety behavior stuff, which is That's like the net next. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but yes That's the thing that I always seem to go to. I mean in the past I've I've done I've got some hypnotherapy audios. So I'll just Go upstairs. Maybe lay on the bed Headphones in and just take 20 minutes out And the I do 100 feel the benefits after it. It's just that I don't always Go and do that. I don't know why I find these things that work And these things that help like we'll eat healthily for a few weeks and I'll get on the treadmills often as I can And these things I feel benefits, but when I feel a bit better I tend to just Scrap them and think right. I'm okay now. We can knock that on the head and let's carry on But you notice that you start to Dwindle again after not doing those things. That's very true That's where your initial point about practicing even when you feel good is so important because These are habits. We have to actually build a habit So let's let's talk about like you said, okay So you might use some hypno, you know, uh, hypnosis type recordings or guided meditations. A lot of people like those We'll call them guided meditations. Um, I wouldn't necessarily call it a safety behavior I mean, you know, no, no, obviously. I was thinking that that's what I would usually do like By splashing more. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I hear things that save me So coping techniques, I think we can probably outline them and then there's a couple of major ones. There's there's breathing techniques There there's progressive. There's muscle body relaxation techniques And to me the most important one is that are the techniques that are designed to quiet your thoughts like calm your mind down So when you're when you're dealing with coping techniques in the context of high anxiety or panic, you're really looking at trying to You know, take the edge off physically if you can And Stop the the runaway train of catastrophic thoughts and what ifs and oh my god's and that fear cycle in your head You have to quiet your mind So let's talk about breathing breathing is a big one, right? Yeah, I think there's a few breathing exercises on our youtube channel. So there's a million of them Yeah, yeah, they're everywhere and they are useful. I think if you very you've just got to give yourself time I think that one of the main things for me when I first ever did them Was just because you Or for me anyway, thinking about my breathing. That's one of the Things that sets off anxiety for me sometimes. So I'll think I'm not brute getting enough breath or whatever Yes, so when when you're sitting and you're telling yourself, right? I'm going to sit and do a breathing exercise Which means I'm going to be bringing my attention to my breath, which is what freaks me out Sometimes that can be a bit of a Maybe that puts people off doing it and certainly for the first few minutes you may feel a bit uncomfortable because you Carbon dioxide levels and your oxygen levels are going to be completely different probably to what you're used to Yes, so just give yourself a chance, but they definitely do help relax your whole body. You feel your muscles just Start to ease when you Give those breathing exercises a chance and when you do it correctly and these are Things that have been just time tested and we measured in things like galvanic response and emg studies and things like that Yeah, there is an actual relaxation response that the human body has and you can help trigger it By proper breathing and in a nutshell it has to do with breathing into your belly and not your chest That's right. That's the two most right two most important things are diaphragmatic breathing where you're breathing You know your chest shouldn't be rising your shoulders should be right your belly should be going out And in the inhale and that the exhale should be longer than the inhale Right, um Wait, do I have that right? I haven't done it in a while exhale out. Yeah Exhale is longer than the inhale. So say inhale for five exhale for seven inhale for three exhale for five And the reason why the exhale is longer than the inhale is to keep I just want to make sure I have that right We do have that right, correct. It's one. Okay. Yeah 100% Yeah, thank you That's to help because what winds up happening in breathing techniques is a lot of people wind up doing the Yeah, the heavy side and that will lead to your nose tingling and your lips tingling and your hands tingling And hyperventilation and and that sort of thing So if you do your breathing incorrectly you can actually make things a little worse by putting yourself in In the hyperventilated kind of state. So I think a lot of the symptoms are related to breathing, aren't they? Dizzyness and yes, very much. I think a lot of people will find I know for me I would always find like wait a minute. Why am I holding my breath? I didn't even realize I was holding my breath Um, so learning those breathing techniques and just practicing them as many times a day as possible So it just becomes a habit to breathe that way It is important. So I'm sure we can I'm sure we can link a few good videos where people show how to do it We don't have to talk about it that much. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely There's hundreds and yeah, and then the next one I think I'd probably talk about is the other way to relax your body would be like progressive muscle relaxation is And we can link a million of those videos as well Yeah, you got one. Yeah, okay. So progressive muscle relaxation is essentially you're scanning my own content. Yeah Very good. Push your own content. It's good content. Billy's content is solid So progressive muscle relaxation is essentially all about scanning your body, which is a bad thing for people like us But you're scanning your body for those tension points where you're holding that tension physically and then letting it go There was one one in particular that I had a current where I got the The audio from but it started off with the breathing So you'd spend like five minutes doing the breathing just to regulate Then you moved on to the body scan which was nice and then you'd do a visualization So like that had the three things intertwined and that was Spot on that's what I used to use a lot Then you'd always find that that progressive muscle relaxation After it you do actually feel You can feel the tension just going out of you once you've worked through the exercises highly recommended. Yeah Yeah, and learning how to do that is a good thing. Yeah. Yeah And then I think the third key for me and I'm sure that other people by all means throw them the comments and whatnot If you have other other coping techniques, but that The the quieting your mind to me is the single biggest thing and I think it's the one best Yes, it's the one that Everybody ignores because we can learn to breathe We can learn to tense and relax and it's easy to learn those things It's difficult to learn to quiet your mind on demand And and really what we're learning here are meditation skills and it has to do with mindfulness and living in the moment and all those things But in a nutshell What I can tell you is the skill that you're looking for is Learning to to think about nothing, which I know sounds crazy like how do you think about nothing? But in the end you are learning the skill of literally emptying your head of thoughts But that doesn't mean locking the door and keeping the thoughts out thoughts can come in and then you just let them go You don't engage with them. You don't dialogue with them And the object of the game is to just quiet your mind To zero if you can and this is one that really takes practice And you have to do it several times a day just a few minutes at a time You don't have to get in the lotus position with incense for an hour and going to an altered state people I think misinterpret that whole meditation thing But learning that skill and practicing it five six seven times every single day even when you feel great just learning to do that You're building the habit, right? It's it's building habit Yeah Yeah, and then what I find is if you combine that with breathing with muscle relaxation You start to get into the habit of when you feel that stress or there's something pressing on you be it anxiety panic is coming Those things automatically kick in and just like we know how to recite the alphabet because we've done it 10 zillion times You just know how to do these things and you do them And even if you get to full-blown panic it might only last seven eight 10 12 minutes as opposed to I was in a panic for You know hours These make they coping techniques really do make a difference And I think I'm thinking sorry go no no I was going to say and I think to me the the mental You know dealing with your thoughts is the single most important one that gets ignored more than any other because it's the hardest Yeah, yeah, it's the me. Yeah, I would agree Do you have a certain because what you've obviously done this many a times do you have a certain? Thoughts because they a lot of red light people say Push me away on clouds and stuff like that does that stuff work or do you just acknowledge the thought and then How do you how do you push the thought away? That's a good question for me? Let me think about this like the best visualization I wound up for me Is that a thought goes in one side and then out the other right? Like it like I literally try and visualize the thought like leaving out of like my right ear It's always a left to right. I don't know why but you know, okay, so a thought comes in all right fine I'm just going to let it float out this side and go away So the key there is to understand that it's okay to have a thought and that thought could be oh my god I'm having a heart attack like in the middle of a panic attack or it could be like, oh, if you know, we need Whatever I need milk So it could it could be anything and when you're practicing when you feel good You know that the thoughts may be about work or your kids or or what happened in you know A football batch than the previous day would it could be anything But you let the thought come in you let it go and you get to the point where you're at that base state of no thought Just no thought and it's it's difficult to learn and you really have to practice it a lot That's it, especially in the heat of the moment. I guess that yes Because if you'd never practice it when you don't if you don't do it any of these things If you don't do it when you feel good, you can't do it when you feel bad Yeah, exactly the last thing that comes into your head. That's exactly right And you may think I know and what I find is that people they don't practice or they don't they don't hone these skills And then panic starts to hit and then okay now I have to breathe and they try and do it Yeah, try and mediate wonder why it's not it's not working and then at least things don't work And then they get discouraged like that's not sense like it doesn't work for me But but you have to learn to build the habit even when you feel good every day so that on demand You just naturally react by slowing down your breathing relaxing your body Going limp and quieting your mind and I will tell you and I know I'm rambling here a little bit So bear with me for a second. That's okay. I feel like this is your well I will tell you that that skill of combining those things Not only had got me out of you know being afraid of panic So I could be had honestly I could be having a panic attack right now. You would really not know and um Not but but you really wouldn't know And uh, they have carried through to other aspects of my life. So when I get into situations I mean I own my own business and When the place is on fire as happens sometimes The the comment I get most often is like you're always just like this man. How do you do that? Like you just you just quiet, you know, just calmly see what's wrong and then we fix it And you don't ever panic. You don't freak out. You're calm under pressure And I used to be like a crazy type A like yelling and screaming kind of guy And I still have a temper sometimes but that skill that I learned in terms of helping me get out of anxiety Panic has served me very very well in the whole rest of my life Just it just things you get a lot of clarity under pressure when you can do that So I highly recommend learning how to do these things Well, that's that's the habit you've you've formed the new habit and it's carried over Yes, as it will to every every aspect. Yeah. Yeah So I think the the key thing is just to recap a little bit and I'm not sure how long we've been going for because we seem to ramble sometimes but you know, billy made the good point of Doing these things when you feel good Like not just when you feel bad super super important and also understanding that none of what we're talking about here Be it relax muscle relaxation breathing or meditation skills are going to stop your panic dead in its tracks It's just not just not And I think what we're looking for is we talk about like claire weeks We talk about those books all the time and like the other series I was doing with holly Yeah, that the ability to relax and do the opposite relax into your anxiety relax into your panic is this This is how you do it. This is what you do. Yeah. Yeah So, I don't know. I don't if you want to add anything to that people ask all the time Well, what do you mean relax into the panic? I mean do these things these exactly that's it That's the it's the exact opposite to what you think you should be doing at that moment Or what you you feel that you're being compelled to do. Yes, do the do the opposite in a way. Yeah in a way and I think And I know it's going to kind of naturally the the next episode We're going to do is about you know, the difference between coping and avoidance or safety behaviors But maybe we should mention a little something about that. That's going to be my 40 Yes, I'm on the avoidance king the king Well, I'll just I'll just say this past weekend I was just telling drew before we came on my dad was rushed into hospital on saturday people that have anxiety They're probably freaking out now hospitals talk but like I had to go over see my dad at his house the ambulance turned up And then I was absolutely fine at this point For some strange reason my thoughts were directed at him and not Whether I was getting enough air On all that kind of crazy crap But then as soon as he went to the hospital that became like my anxiety took over and I knew that I had to drive I don't know about 40 minutes In a direction to a place that I've never been before And that was sort of the peak of my anxiety was getting there So I he's been in hospital since saturday and I've avoided Going in to visit him. So I've been going to the car park and sitting there. So I'm kind of pushing my boundaries But I'm still avoiding Going in the hospital. So I'm sitting in the freaking car park is pretty pointless But I am taking people to visit him. So I'm doing something But I'm just not doing enough and that's the avoidance But then to mention like safety behaviors the first day that we went I had my claire week's book with me bottles of water packets of mints bags of crisps Oh, yeah, just No, the same toolkit from way back when we all shared right the mints. Yeah, that's it. That's it And it's always like now that we we've been going pretty much every day I think we've been every day for the last hour. I don't know since saturday And like every day i'm just leaving something behind So like we're going later this evening. So I know it'll probably just be a bottle of water and a packet of mints We can leave the claire weeks book at home now You know, and I've been getting when we've been I've been sitting in the car park I've been getting out of the car and just walking further from the car every time we've gone It's just it's like that gradual thing. It's just that he's due to come out tomorrow So by the time I actually get to the reception desk, he'll be leaving Yeah, well, we want you dead to get out of the hospital as soon as possible But but if he was there unfortunately for a very long time sooner or later Probably in about a week or so you'd be going to visit him. I bet yeah I think I'd be in there. Yeah, but it's just that like the avoidance. Yeah I mean, I'm interested in in discussing what I avoid but also maybe other people's comments and Things that they avoid the other safety behaviors as well because that's it's always very interesting I think to bring it back to today's topic There's a there's a blur and it's hard to understand sometimes between What a coping technique is and what avoidance and safety behaviors are Coping is good and avoidance and safety is bad. It's a very over simplification, but we'll talk about that next time I think yeah, we could probably talk a lot about that. That's what I struggled with today's episode being coping techniques because I don't cope that well No, but you know, I don't really think about I just seem to get through it I don't have specific things unless it's real bad and that's when I'll go and listen to Relaxation audio stuff like that. That's when I tend to turn to it when I'm at the height So I'm not I don't take my own advice in in saying that the prevention Just do this anyway. Yeah, you know same with exercise same with diet and caffeine and sleeping Actually, all of those are good too. We didn't really talk about that But even even things that you can do outside of the realm of being anxious or panicky and Eating well and trying to and I know it's hard when you're dealing with anxiety sometimes sleep is impacted But sleeping the best you can and eating well and regular exercise and and even having friends or family being social Sharing your burdens sometimes with a therapist or you know, somebody close to you that you can trust These are all just good mental health skills that everybody should have anyway And they also help I feel that those are also coping behaviors. They're just sort of background coping behaviors I think yeah, yeah, because if you can bring your mental emotional state to a more manageable level overall It tends to tends to help the anxiety thing a little bit and I there's one other thing. I think it's worth mentioning Um Like because you said well, you're not very good at coping but which I think is wrong I think you're you're a little harsh on yourself or you wouldn't be where you are if it wasn't that Yeah, but um, I I think So we talk about these things and these skills that you can learn to do and practice when you know When you're feeling good so you can put them into into action when you need to And building habits and all these kind of things like what we're talking about here is making a plan like a coping plan There's actually a strategy here. I'm going to learn to meditate. I'm going to learn to breathe properly I'm going to learn aggressive muscle relaxation. I'm going to change my diet But the trick is you have to make a plan and have a strategy and then actually execute that so This is nowhere in that my old article here But I think it really highlights the fact that if you're going to overcome these problems. It's an active process There's no We were talking about a video I watched not too long ago where somebody said the answer to anxiety was rest And and it's it's flat out not it's an active process So you have to actively make a plan to learn these skills and then actively practice them Learn them and practice them. So for one day not for one day. It's a plan Yeah, that's it like you get the fire and then you Maybe you watch a few youtube videos and you think right today is the day. Yeah Today ain't the day today can be the start right You know no one day is the day no one day and when it comes to coping techniques Maybe the thing that highlights that the most is that this is not Actually, you get all you know you watch somebody You know do a big challenge you get all pumped up and then you go to the supermarket that you haven't been to in Six months and that's great But that's not really a plan like it's it's not a long-term strategy And it's not a day you build these skills over long periods of time So this could be weeks or months or a year where you you execute this plan that you have to make so that's coping techniques Do we miss anything? We can probably talk for another hour, but I could probably talk for another hour about this I appear to have a lot to say about this. I'm sorry. I kind of monopolize the conversation. No, that's good. That's good Yeah, so uh, all right. So next time we're going to do avoidance techniques difference between coping and avoidance and safety behaviors and that sort of stuff So we'll do that Yes, and of course I will end by reminding everybody, you know, where you can find us billy on youtube, right youtube.com anxiety united, yep YouTube.com slash that anxiety guy, I believe I have now I don't even know or that anxiety guy comm twitter that anxiety guy facebook that anxiety whatever And we're getting some links are everywhere If you're on the podcast page or the youtube channel and subscribe to both of us and like the videos We never asked people to do that like i'm a terrible youtuber You're supposed to get a like and subscribe Um, yeah, so anyway, that's the deal with that. All right, folks Awesome. Let's hear what you have to say comments. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see you next time