How to Escape Cycles of Panic, Overwhelm and Dread

“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.” ~Bessel A. van der Kolk

It’s early morning, and I wake with an intense sensation of foreboding. I say wake up, but really, it’s just coming fully into consciousness, as I’ve been semi-conscious all night. Fitfully tossing and turning, a deep anxiety gnawing at my chest.

My mind has been flipping back and forth—across different subjects, even different times, collecting insurmountable evidence that my life is going terribly, and I’ll always feel like I’m just about hanging on by a thread.

I drag myself out of bed, exhausted as usual, meeting the day with an intense feeling of disappointment in myself. Why am I always bouncing between anxiety and panic? Why can’t I control myself so that I stop being fed a constant stream of fearful, self-blaming, intrusive thoughts?

Why can’t these terrible emotions just give me a break once in a while so I could complete some of the things that I’m so anxious about? Why is my life so riddled with overwhelm, and how on earth do I escape this?

That early morning six years ago was a scenario that had played out on repeat for decades. Different worries plagued me at twenty than at forty. But the texture of my mornings, the texture of my days, was the same. Except that by forty I was more tired—my body exhausted from being in this perpetual state of different flavors of fear. I’d had more than enough. Enough was twenty-five years ago.

I’d tried lots of different things—did different types of talk therapy, changed my diet, exercised, went on retreats, completed four different types of meditation training, read endless books, removed stressful-feeling friendships, moved several times, left the country… And while so many things gave me some good ideas, took the edge off things for a while, and at times felt really good, I would always return to the same baseline.

When I missed a meditation, left the retreat, or walked out of the therapy office, I would feel just as alone, just as vulnerable to the forces of the world to take me down into pits of dread and despair. A baseline that was sinking from the weight of so much overwhelm and a life lived in a state of panic.

I didn’t want to feel like this anymore. This wasn’t a life. This was living in glue and trying to battle my way through my days.

Over time, I had made my life smaller and smaller so that there were fewer things to be stressed and anxious about. I’d see fewer people who I found difficult. I made my work and home life simpler. But my worries expanded to fit however small I made my life.

I felt so lost, so alone in my struggles, like I was the only one feeling like this. No one else looked like they would panic if things didn’t go how they needed them to go.

One day by chance, while researching something online for work, I randomly happened upon a coach and decided to give her a try. Over the next few months of working with her, I noticed a small but significant shift in how I was feeling.

I felt a lot calmer; I woke up without punishing dread. I started sleeping better and felt less like I needed to carefully manage my life in order to cope.

I was hooked.

What had happened?

My coach explained to me about the survival states of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—how I’d been bouncing around between freeze and fawn my whole life, and that’s why I felt so terrible.

Survival is a mode our nervous system goes into when there’s an actual physical threat on the horizon or there’s too much emotional pressure that we don’t know how to deal with.

Like emotions are flooding us, and our nervous system says, “No! We need to protect against this emotional flood.” So survival mode gets turned on.

Unfortunately, survival mode doesn’t feel good! It doesn’t help us live in a state where we are thriving, feeling calm, hopeful, productive, and like life is full of possibility.

Living in survival mode feels awful because it’s a state that we aren’t meant to live in for long stretches of time.

It’s a state we’re meant to access when there’s an actual threat to our survival, but because of how much emotional pressure so many of us carry, many of us are living there a lot of the time.

All emotions are natural and valid; we aren’t meant to disconnect from or suppress them. But when we do, emotional pressure builds.

Emotional pressure can come from an array of sources.

1. When we had experiences as children that brought up a lot of emotions but were left alone to deal with them, and it was too much for our child selves.

Experiences like our parents’ divorce, financial struggles, health issues, and alcoholism. Maybe we had an accident or witnessed abuse or experienced bullying or neglect.

2. Any times when we had natural human emotions like fear, shame, guilt, sadness, and anger but received no emotional support to help us process these emotions as children.

When we have families that don’t know how to process their own emotions, then they can’t support us in learning how to process ours.

When we’re left alone to face terror, that terror is never processed, and the memories of it linger in our body, keeping us trapped in cycles of experiencing it without the opportunity for it to release.

3. Or when our parents and families didn’t allow or tolerate our natural human emotions, like fear, sadness, grief, or anger.

So we had to suppress our feelings, to numb against them, or release the pressure from them in unhealthy ways. Lashing out at others or engaging in destructive behaviors.

When we had to be hyper aware of our parents’ emotions more than our own—instead of our parents being aware of our emotions—as is the case with so many people.

These experiences disconnect us from ourselves, our emotions, and our needs. And when we don’t have the opportunity to process emotions and emotionally activating experiences throughout our lives, the emotional pressure builds over the years until, often late into adulthood, it starts to feel way too much. 

What I needed—and what so many of us need—was to release the emotional pressure. To allow the emotions that had been building up to slowly and gently release through my body. And to feel safe to do so.

To show my nervous system how to move out of a state of needing to be in survival mode and into a state of safety.

To be able to feel emotions like fear, anger, sadness, and grief in a way that felt safe so that I wasn’t being pushed into a survival mode every time fear showed up. Or anger, sadness, or even joy.

So where do we start if we want to stop living in survival mode?

For decades I felt, as many of my clients do when they first come to me—that my reactions of panic and overwhelm, of struggling with dread and resentment, of feeling so often on edge, were somehow something to do with my personality.

Oh, I am just a panicky person. 

I am just someone who is very safety conscious and anxious.

I am just someone who struggles to slow down and not be busy.

I am a control freak—it’s just who I am.

None of these things are personality traits. They are merely a reflection of a nervous system that has lived under too much emotional pressure for too long. It has survival mode on speed dial.

Understanding this can give us some space between us and the reaction or behavior we exhibit in survival mode, which can help us support ourselves more effectively.

When we’ve been encouraged to disconnect from our emotions, or we’ve had too many experiences in our lives that created significant emotional impact that have been dismissed or ignored, one of the first, most powerful steps is to start attuning to our own emotions and needs.

To know that every emotional reaction and survival response we have has a reason.

Many situations, people, and experiences created this emotional pressure that we’re still carrying. And if there is emotional pressure and pain still within us, it means there hasn’t been enough emotional healing.

Period.

The body does not lie.

Our emotions do not lie.

Our feelings of unease, unsafety, and sensitivity do not lie.

When we judge our reactions and our emotions, it feels like putting a stopper on the jar. It blocks our emotional healing.

Instead, when we can turn toward ourselves with kindness, understanding, compassion, and curiosity about why we feel how we do, this is an incredibly powerful first step in healing.

Coming out of long-term survival mode takes time.

In my experience, there isn’t a quick fix for living through decades of survival in a body that’s been dysregulated by unhealed emotional pain from trauma. Taking a slow, gentle, but consistent approach is what has created the most profound, permanent, and expansive change for me and for my clients.

The nervous system loves baby steps. And when we think in terms of how long we have lived in this state, taking time to unravel and rewire our reactions over months or years—that’s as long as it took to create these responses, right?

Our nervous system has been pushing us into a protective state for a long time, so we want to acknowledge this push into survival and be gentle with ourselves as we emerge from it.

Survival mode is a protective response—it doesn’t feel good, but your nervous system thinks you need to be in this mode because of the emotional pressures from the past.

So we’re taking the long game here. The nervous system loves slow, gentle change.

I love what the teacher Deb Dana says, “We want to stretch our nervous system, not stress it.”

We can’t generally talk our way out of survival mode; we need to create the conditions for our nervous system to move out of it.

What the nervous system needs is to feel safe. That there isn’t an emergency or a threat to our survival on the horizon.

By regularly doing things that turn on the parasympathetic part of our nervous system, which is the ‘rest and digest’ part, we can start to feel calmer and more grounded. This is the first step in healing. It means that we aren’t always stuck in this urgent state.

Here are some simple ways we can start sending cues of safety to our nervous system so that we can turn down the dial of survival—that intense stress-overwhelm-hypervigilant state.

One of the simplest ways we can come out of survival or intense overwhelm is with this breath. Take a short, full inhale through the nose and then an extra inhale on top. And then a long, slow exhale. Often, doing this once or twice is enough, but you can do this for a couple of minutes to get to a deeper state of regulation and relaxation.

When we are in survival mode, we get tunnel vision, and our minds loop on one subject. When we notice this tunnel vision or fixations, we can bring a cue of safety to our nervous system by expanding our vision.

We can start, very slowly, letting our eyes drift around our space, turning our necks and looking above us, below us, and behind us. Take a few minutes to take in all of the space we are in. Going very slowly (slowness is also a cue of safety for the nervous system). Looking out of the window, especially if we can see a horizon line. The nervous system finds the horizon very soothing, and looking toward our exit too.

This shows our nervous system there are no threats nearby.

When we are in survival mode, we disconnect from our bodies. We may not realize this because we feel flooded with challenging, sometimes painful sensations. But when we ask ourselves, “Can I feel my feet? My fingers?” We see that we have disconnected from our body.

Survival can feel like a very ‘head’ only experience, as we get locked into the terrible/terrifying/looping intrusive thoughts that survival mode creates.

A simple body scan can help bring us into connection with our body and therefore into a sensation of safety. Gently going through our bodies, noticing each limb or section, wiggling or flexing the area if it feels numb, brings a strong cue of safety to the nervous system so that it can ‘turn off’ from survival mode.

These simple exercises can be a powerful beginning, creating a gentle shift, one step at a time, toward creating a safe anchor within our body in which to land.

This is also an incredibly useful step in this work of healing our survival mode reactions. When we understand that, in fact, all emotions are valid, all emotions are natural, and all emotions are looking to express needs, we can start to change our perceptions of our emotional experiences.

Of course, we don’t want to throw our emotions at other people—shouting in anger or terrifying our kids because we feel scared. We want to take responsibility for our emotions—always.

But we need to know that what emotions are yearning for is to be seen, felt, and heard. They want space, and they want to be acknowledged.

Can we validate our emotions, offering them some compassion and understanding, instead of trying to push them away, suppress them, or argue with them?

It’s in this brave and courageous act of turning toward and accepting our emotions that we get the chance to allow them enough space to release through our bodies—so we stop keeping them suppressed inside.

Change—and rewiring our nervous system responses—is always possible.

What has been the most hopeful and encouraging thing on my journey to release myself from punishing anxiety and persistent survival mode is recognizing that it’s possible for us to reconnect to our natural state of self-healing.

Our nervous system is built to naturally release stress, overwhelm, and trauma. When we can bring safety to our bodies and start to powerfully attune to ourselves and our emotions, offering ourselves compassion and support, it’s possible to start reconnecting to that natural state. To rewire our patterns of overwhelm—from feeling on edge so often, quick to panic or anxiety to feeling calmer, grounded, and confident in ourselves.

Diana Bird is a Neuro-Emotional coach and writer who helps people break free from overwhelm, panic and dread, stepping into calm and confidence. Sign up for her free emotional-processing mini workshop and receive powerful tools, free training, and ongoing support to transform your emotional well-being. Take the first step toward lasting emotional change. Diana lives in southern Spain with her two children and photographer husband.

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