You may be wondering what anxiety has to do with time management. We often don’t understand what anxiety is or how to best deal with it, so we are wasting our time. You can relate to this as you may suffer form anxiety or you know somebody who has panic attacks.

So what’s anxiety?

Anxiety is a physical response of your body when you are agitated due to uncertainty. It is a repeated habit of worrying.

How often you’ve heard ‘Calm down’ when somebody had a panic attack? This doesn’t work as the person doesn’t know HOW TO CALM DOWN, so instead of gaining control of their state, their anxiety rises. The hard rate increases, the breathing is fast and shallow, the head is spinning 100m/h.

Think about it, if you had to deal with out of control speeding train- you wouldn’t just put a block on its way to stop it- this would cause a crash. What you do want is to pivot it and allow it to loose its speed.

Anxiety, fear and excitement have the same symptoms in your body: quick and shallow breathing, hot flashes, increased heartbeat, closing up throat. All these physical reactions happen circa 90sec BEFORE you have panic attack. This means you have 1.5 min to trick your brain into thinking you are excited.

Your brain need to have an explanation why you are feeling on these things in your body. Think about the time when you were about to have car crash. In a heartbeat you’ve got hot flash, your heart started to beat really fast, maybe your hands got sweaty… Your brain understood why you experienced it, and you didn’t get panic attack, instead you calmed down and those symptoms gone away- your breathing became normal and you were breathing at usual rate.

Next time when you are feeling that you are getting typical to you symptoms for the panic attack, you have 90 seconds to give your brain an explanation before it will be hijacked.
Think intensively of something super exciting for you, a vivid memory, or experience of your life.

Trick your brain before it will trick you!