How to Support Your Child in Coming Down from a Panic Attack

 I'm not sure there is anything more scary than watching your child go through a panic attack. , they're scared, which makes you scared, which makes them scared, which makes you scared. So let's talk about what you can actually do in the event that this is occurring with your little person. First, let's understand.

A panic attack is a rush of neurochemical. That are excitatory. Okay? And it's getting triggered for a myriad of reasons. So panic attacks are not always triggered. From some, uh, specific thought or awareness. Sometimes it's just the brain misfiring or over firing in response to stimuli that someone doesn't understand and maybe never understand.

So I wanna just put that out there. It's not something that, as a parent, that you're gonna be able necessarily to investigate and say, oh, this is what the trigger was, and then we can do this, and then it'll never happen again. It's less. Knowing why it happened, and it's more about helping your child to cope when it happens, and helping you have the tools so that you know, this is what I need to do.

So I'm gonna give you the three tools that I want you to use the next time your child has a panic attack. But first, let me describe how you know they're having one. So when someone is having a panic, , they often look like they're having trouble breathing. . Yeah. Okay. They often are sweating profusely because they're getting so much adrenaline that it's making them sweat.

and they often can't sit still and are, are, are, are moving in some kind of a repetitive way that's signaling distress, but they aren't able to stop and they aren't able usually to receive any words or any touch to calm their bodies down. Okay. Panic attacks can last anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours, which is a really long.

How long the attack lasts is usually about a lot of different factors. How tired is this person? How recently have had they had protein? What is the support response like? What environment are they in? So having a panic attack in public is gonna probably make that panic attack bigger than if you're in a room by yourself or with just a few safe people.

So know that there's a realm of normalcy in that. . If you are in this situation and you see that your child has started to panic, the number one thing they need you to do is to be close, but not too close. So if my child is panicking, I'm not gonna try to touch them. I'm not gonna try to come right up into their grill, but I'm also not gonna back way off.

So I'm gonna. Probably about a foot or so away from them, unless they're signaling for me to move further. If they want me to move further or move closer, great. If they're communicating that, that means they're getting closer to the panic attack ending, and I'm gonna do whatever it is they're asking me to do.

But if they are in that non-communicative state, I'm gonna say about a foot away and I am going to use my body as a calming grounding presence. Okay, so I am going to essentially on. Say, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. You're having a panic. Your, your body is scared and that's it. I'm not going to repeat any other things.

You're scared. I'm here, you're scared I'm here and I'm gonna model gently breathing. And that might.  be a response that bothers them at first because they're, when you're in a panic attack, basically everything is agitating. So don't stop just because they're going . You just, just, just stay. Staying grounded, staying centered.

You want them to see you going, like empathy, right? So my, my eyes are gonna be a little like this, right? Not like this and not like this. Cuz that looks like I'm scared. This looks like I'm mad It.

I'm here. We're here together. I'm here. And you are going to calm your own body with those breaths so that you are staying calm, so that they aren't getting triggered by your freaking up. So the worst thing you can do is go, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong? Can you breathe?

Right? Because now we're now we're re-triggering that same experience in their bodies. So we're just staying calm, we're staying with them, and we're waiting until they hit the point of collapse. . So there's always a collapse point after a panic attack, and it looks different for every kid and every person.

For some folks, it's literally like physically they will just lay down once it's done. For other folks, they might sort of do like a. A slump. And at that juncture, that's where you can say, come here, come crawl into my lap. Let me hold you. Maybe you just hold 'em and say like, oh, that was so hard. What you went through was so hard.

So let me review this. Three things we're doing. One, we are keeping our bodies calm.  and we are modeling calm breathing. We are staying about a foot cl away from them unless they asked us to go further or stay closer. And we are saying, I'm here. We can say you're scared or I'm here, but we're not adding any other statements.

Now, if your child is verbal during this panic attack, so they're saying, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die, I'm gonna. You can say back to them, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe. Whew. You're safe. I'm here. You're safe. There is something they're saying specifically like He's looking at me.

He's looking at me. He's looking at me. You can, you can address that need by standing in between them and go, I'm gonna make sure he can't. I'm gonna make sure he can't see you anymore. I got you here. They can't see you anymore, like curl their head up into your body so they can't see other people seeing them, if that's bothering them.

But essentially you're letting your child borrow your calmness. . Now, if these panic attacks are happening with regularity, it's probably time to go see a therapist and work through like what else could be happening, what other triggers, what we can do in the environment, maybe some, um, sensory tools that kind of helps your child calm their body down.

But I do want you to know that it is normal for every kid to have a panic attack, whether it's small or big at some point throughout their development. It's a part of the brain's reaction to living. Very stimulating world. So don't freak out. It doesn't necessarily mean this is a condition that your child has.

Um, if your intuition is that it is a condition, go ask for help and get some more tools on how to manage it. But in the meantime, let your children borrow your calmness and for your own brain, think of the panic, like a wave. All waves go up and all waves come back down, and your job is not to make the wave come back down faster.

It's simply to ride the wave with your chi, whether that wave is two minutes or 20 minutes, ride the wave until they come back down and then lay on the shore together. So relieved that you're out of that crashing water. Good luck.

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