Sit With Your Anxiety
Brink also noted that if he's having a full-blown panic attack, he's learned to let himself feel anxious and lean into that physical and emotional discomfort no matter how uncomfortable it is. "Discomfort isn't necessarily a bad thing, and paying attention to the panic (rather than distracting myself from it) has also made me pay attention to the fact that it always eventually goes away," he says. "Now I see panic as value-neutral; it's not bad, it's just something that happens that I have to get through."
Waslik agrees. "I tell myself to acknowledge my anxiety instead of running away from it. Sometimes that means telling the person I'm with that I'm experiencing it, or just embracing it into my body, feeling it, and telling myself it's OK to sit with it and that it doesn't always pass right away," she says.