You felt your heart start to race and then you started to notice the fear of your heart racing

and that exact moment, that second moment, is where you get locked into panic.

Understanding this is the first step.

But today I'm actually going to show you a step-by-step plan on how to practice interoceptive

exposures for panic and panic disorder.

My name is Kimberly Quinlan.

I'm an anxiety and OCD specialist, and I am on a mission to help 10 million people with

anxiety.

I know in my heart that we can suffer less. The world is hard

enough and I want to make sure that you can manage your anxiety and go and live your life. Spread

the love around. There is so much crap on the internet these days about anxiety. So my hope is to

give you evidence-based skills where you can help reduce your own suffering with anxiety. So my hope is to give you evidence-based skills where you can help

reduce your own suffering with anxiety. So let's get started. So what actually is happening during a

panic attack? Now I want to explain it by using a graph that we use all the time with our students. And it's

going to start here in the sensations of anxiety. What often happens is something happens and you

feel an intense increase in sensations of anxiety. It might be a heart rate, it might be start to

sweat, your tummy might start hurting. When you have that anxiety, that is the first moment.

But then what happens is we catastrophes or we misinterpret those sensations

as dangerous. And then the cycle is off and it's running. And so what happens here is you've

had this sensation, you've interpreted as dangerous or problematic or that it means something,

and then you have an even higher increase in anxiety.

It's kind of like you're telling your brain like, yes, yes, in fact, this is dangerous.

...