Reduce Anxiety and Panic Long-Term. Here's How!

When you type "What to do about panic attacks?" into common search engines, you’ll find countless tips like "call a friend," "drink water," or "do breathing exercises." These are (more or less) helpful strategies to make a panic attack as tolerable as possible. Distraction, safety behaviors, avoidance, and escape may seem effective, but these very behaviors sustain anxiety and panic in the long term. Why this happens is explained in this article.

How Do Anxiety and Panic Attacks Develop?

According to learning theory, our fear center primarily associates stimuli and learns from experiences. Unfortunately, this process isn’t particularly rational. For example, if you have a panic attack while sitting on a bus, these two stimuli (bus & panic) can become associated. Your fear center learns from this experience: bus rides = panic. Since your fear center wants to protect you, it stores bus rides (which aren’t inherently dangerous) as a threat, causing fear the next time you board a bus. This process is called classical conditioning in psychology.

Why Are Anxiety and Panic Sustained?

When a specific behavior leads to a specific consequence, your fear center draws another learning experience from it. This is called operant conditioning in psychology. If you avoid taking the bus or escape when you feel uncomfortable, the consequence is that you don’t have a panic attack. Through this experience, your fear center reinforces the belief that it must continue protecting you from bus rides. Initially, this seems beneficial because avoidance/escape = no fear/panic. However, this deprives your fear center of the chance to make a corrective experience, such as learning that nothing bad happens while riding a bus, and there’s no reason to fear it.

The same principle applies to distraction and safety behaviors. For instance, if you always carry water or medication when taking the bus (safety behavior), call a friend, or do breathing exercises (distractions), your fear center falsely learns that these tools are necessary to avoid fear. In a way, you become dependent on these aids. If they’re unavailable, anxiety resurfaces. Additionally, distraction often prolongs your anxiety in the moment. As you can see, this isn’t a sustainable long-term solution.

The good news is: Learned behaviors can be unlearned or relearned through corrective experiences! This doesn’t happen overnight—it requires time and active exposure exercises. But it’s achievable!

Corrective Experiences and Exposure Exercises

To remove items from your fear list, the principle is: Wait and do nothing! During exposure, you deliberately place yourself in a fear-inducing situation and stay there until your fear subsides on its own, without distractions or safety behaviors. Think of your fear like a child throwing a tantrum—it’s best to wait it out and do nothing. Let the panic run its course, and it will eventually tire itself out.

As your fear center repeatedly experiences that panic subsides on its own and no real danger exists in exposure situations, the process of habituation (getting used to it) begins. Your fear center learns from these corrective experiences: “There’s nothing to fear!”

Mindable helps you train your fear center step by step through targeted exposure to fear-inducing situations, reducing panic in the long term. We guide you toward a life free of fear.

Want to learn more? Check out our module “What Sustains My Anxiety?” in the Mindable App for Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia. Curious about how exposure works? You’ll find a module on that in our app, too.

How? Download Mindable from the App Store or Google Play, understand the mechanisms behind your anxiety, and start your path to recovery today.