Taming the Lion: Calming our Nervous System in Times of Panic by Amanda Stoddard

Jul 11

I am faced with the metaphorical lion chasing me for sport.

The lion being this sinking feeling inside my chest. Most people would refer to it as anxiety, or panic, but I like to pretend it’s an outside force, this way it has less control over my being. I take a deep breath, try to move through it, and realize my body is only trying to keep me safe. My partner hasn’t responded to me all day. Is something wrong? Is he hurt? I send him another text just to check “Sent as Text Message”... it didn't go through? The lion gets closer, the panic becomes greater. Is this my gut telling me something is really wrong? My mind cycles through scenarios that may have happened. I hold my breath until he responds. Trying not to spiral out.

Back in our caveman days our brain would prepare us for a lion’s attack, it would send a jolt of energy through our bodies in order to supercharge our ability to run away from the imminent danger. Our bodies are still wired that way, thinking something simple as a final exam, or a confrontation between friends, or even an unanswered text is the same threat as the lion.

He responds “Hey babe, just busy at work today! I’m good. Love you.”

The lion retreats back inside my chest. I take another deep breath. I lean into the calmness. Tears start to form in the corners of my eyes. Why do I get so worked up about simple things like that? I could’ve sworn my gut was telling me something was wrong. But it was just my anxiety, my fear response, the lion chasing after me.

I breathe again. I tell myself I am safe.

The lion is just telling a story from long long ago that my body remembers as if it happened yesterday.

How do I discern between the lion and my intuition? How do I know what to believe when the lion is all I see? When all I feel like doing is running, fighting, or fawning?

This is just a small and simple example of how anxiety and panic can convince us that our gut is telling us a story, especially when the circumstance brings us back to a moment in time in which we were really stressed, activated, or even traumatized. So how do we trust ourselves when anxiety, trauma, panic, and the lion are at play? In this post, you will learn five different tools that I use in my personal life that help me “Tame the Lion”. Hopefully, these tools can help you in your personal journey or they can help start a conversation between you and your careteam.

In the past, I had an avoidant caregiver who instead of communicating would shut down and stonewall.

Stonewalling: When someone completely shuts down in a conversation or is refusing to communicate with another person.

Every situation that called for any emotion was met with an overreacting and lack of communication. This caused me to become hypervigilant to the emotions of others and to constantly assess my surroundings for a threat, much like our ancestors did with the lion.

Hypervigilance: the elevated state of constantly assessing potential threats around you.

This type of environment happening at such a young age laid the foundation for this type of anxiety to creep up later in life. Due to my caregiver not being able to effectively communicate their emotions, it led to me thinking that someone being unresponsive meant something was wrong or I was in trouble. I never knew what to expect with my caregivers and this led me to have a hyper-senstive response as an adult to those around me, especially when they didn’t respond to my needs. So instead of seeing an unanswered text as just an answered text where my boyfriend was probably just busy with work, it registered the lack of response as another example of “stonewalling”. In this scenario my mind was re-telling an old story and bringing back the lion that was born from family dysfunction. This leads us to ask the age old question:

How do we trust ourselves when anxiety, trauma, panic, and the lion are at play?

Our bodies are always looking for ways to keep us safe and when we’ve grown up in unsafe environments it’s hard to trust the outside world is safe so we use different coping mechanisms to keep our internal world safe. Those coping mechanisms can manifest differently depending on the person. But our caveman ancestors used the three methods of flight, fight, or freeze to ensure they were safe from the lion. These fear responses are often time automatic, developmental, and come from a place long ago.

Even if you feel as if you don’t have trauma or anxiety, these fear responses can still happen. It’s important to listen to what your body is telling you in that moment and assess what you may need. How can we do this? Here are a few ways we can start! But remember this type of internal work is always done best with a therapist, mental health professional, or your careteam.

These tips are ones that helped me through my journey of “Taming the Lion”:

Remember, It’s Okay To Feel
Regulate Before Responding
Ground Yourself.
Ask yourself where/when did you feel this feeling before?
Reach out to friends, family, or your therapist if the lion becomes too strong or your anxiety becomes too much to handle.

Remember, It’s Okay to Feel:

Our feelings are there for a reason whether it’s because of a lion, a trigger, or a serious situation, or maybe it’s a beautiful spring day and you feel the warm sunshine on your skin. Remember our bodies are hard-wired to keep us safe. The hard emotions are just your body’s way of saying “Hey there, I don’t feel very safe right now” and that’s okay! Allow yourself to feel that in that moment, honor it, and realize it’s going to be okay. Sometimes emotions can be big and scary but they always pass. So keep reminding yourself that you’ve felt this before and gotten through it, you will again! Crying cools down the brain, so if you have to cry it out, that’s okay! Honoring our emotions can help us make peace with them instead of trying to fight or distract ourselves from them.

2. Regulate Before Responding:

If the specific situation calls for a response (like in the example above where I wanted my partner to respond to me) it’s important to regulate before you respond if you’re feeling worked up. This goes for a lot of situations like when someone cuts you off in traffic, or maybe you get yelled at by your parents. Just reminding yourself “Hey, I might be in an activated state right now, let me try to use my tools to calm down” this way you can make sure you are not acting out of impulse. Granted, we’re all human and this can be very hard to learn how to do. But learning some of these next tools may help you with that!

3. Ground Yourself:

Do you have tools in your toolbox that help you ground yourself? Maybe it’s a breathing exercise or a meditation. If you find yourself face to face with the lion try to use your tools and ground yourself in the moment. This could look like so many things; maybe a cool towel, essential oils, journaling, or talking it out with yourself. If you’re struggling and would like some extra helpful tips here’s a list of grounding exercises to build resilience you can watch courtesy of us at Hey, I’m Here Ohio, watch our short animation video.

4. Ask Yourself Where/When Did You Feel This Feeling Before?

Is your body re-telling an old story from long ago? Taming the lion can also look like naming the lion. Much like my experience with my mother I realized my reaction to an unanswered text was similar to the emotions I felt as a child when my mother would use stonewalling as a means of reacting. The worry I felt in my chest was the same worry I had for what my mother may or may not do as a result of what happened within the family. Ask yourself, is this feeling coming from the present moment? Or is my body seeing this current situation as a lion that chased me before. Naming the lion can help us realize that our emotions are from before and then we can tell ourselves “I am safe. I am in the present moment. This isn’t the same situation as before”

5. Reach out to friends, family, or your therapist if the lion becomes too strong or your anxiety becomes too much to handle.

Sometimes the lion can get bigger and closer and we can feel the emotions caving in on us and that’s okay. There will be times when the emotions are too big for us to handle alone and that’s okay! It’s so important to reach out to your friends, family, therapist or care team if these emotions are feeling overwhelming. Be sure to keep a contact list, or a physical list of the people you can call or reach out to when things are too much. Remember 988 is the help line and 741-741 is the crisis text line. These tools can help you when the lion is inching closer and you feel it may catch you.

The more we work on these tools, the more we will build our resilience and the faster we will be able to tame the lion. The lion may always be there, but that doesn’t mean it always has to be a threat to us. Sometimes we can tame the lion and live in harmony with it. It is so important to use these tools even when the lion isn’t at play. The more we use our coping skills in a calm, safe, environment the more we will build up our resilience muscle memory! Each time you practice these in a calm state the easier it will be to use them when they’re needed.

Remember, the lion chasing you is from a time long long ago. Just because it may feel big and real like it’s right on your heels doesn’t mean it will catch you. Eventually, anxiety attacks, panic, trauma triggers, fear responses, always pass. Keep grounded in that one truth, you’ve gotten through it before, you can get through it again.