The Anxiety/Panic Attack Journal

I’ve heard about lots of tricks for stopping panic attacks; but using math? Yep, an EasyCalm user from Denmark named Tom recently sent me this tip for stopping panic attacks (Takk Tom!). It involves doing math in your head, and believe it or not, Tom wasn’t the first person to mention this trick to me.

I make no guarantees that this will work for everyone, but obviously, it has worked for some people. So give it a try for yourself and see how it goes.

The technique itself is as simple as they come. The idea is simply to start doing difficult math problems in your head whenever you feel a panic attack coming on. The trick is to make the math problems (or “maths” for my non-North American friends) difficult enough that you have to really focus on them, but not so difficult that you get frustrated and give up. Depending on your skill in math, this could range from simple multiplication to more complicated division, or even algebraic equations if you’re a whiz with the numeros.

I couldn’t try out this technique for stopping panic attacks properly, because, gratefully, I haven’t had a panic attack in a long, long time. But I did get a chance to try it when I was a little stressed about being stuck in traffic a few days ago. I just began doing multiplication problems like 13 X 13, and 21 X 11. My results were kind of mixed (but that could just be me). While I was doing the math problems I did notice that I was somewhat distracted from stressing about the traffic, and the fact that I was running late for an appointment.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!