First Aid for Anxiety: If you’re feeling sick, fluttery, tight chested, pounding heart, sweating, trembling, cramps, dizzy, detached, fearful, tingling then you may be experiencing anxiety such as a panic attack.

Try and steady your breathing. Below are a few exercises to help. In all cases they are about slowing your breath and concentrating on something in the moment with you so as you can regain a bit of control.

-    Box breathing: look for anything square. Focus on the top left corner. Let your eyes follow the horizontal top line to the next corner and as you do this breath out slowly to the count of 5. At the corner let your eyes follow the vertical line down and try to breath in to the count of 5. At the bottom corner follow the horizontal line to the left corner breathing out for 5. Again, follow the vertical to the top breathing in for 5. It may take a few circuits but keep going until you can get your breath longer and slower.

-    Finger breathing. Look at your left hand (if you’re right-handed, look at your right if you’re left-handed). Turn your palm towards you. With your other hand place your index finger at the base of the little finger on the hand you’re looking at. The idea is that as you breath in for the count of 5 you run your finger up the upside of your little finger, then you keep moving your index finger over the top of the little finger and go down the other side for the count of 5. Gradually you track up and down all the fingers of the hand you are looking at, each time breathing in and counting to 5 as you go up and breathing out to the count of 5 as you go back down.

-    5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It doesn’t matter how you do this. The original idea is you tell yourself 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, 2 things you can smell and 1 thing you can taste. But if you’re panicking then trying to remember this correctly can be hard so go for whatever is in front of you i.e. 5 things that are red, 4 types of plant/ food etc etc.

Anxiety happens when an ancient piece on mental hardware in our brains overloads. The amygdala was supposed to shoot adrenalin into your bodies to help us escape sabre- toothed tigers. Not many of those around anymore. Now our crazy world overloads this once useful bit of kit, it panics, and we feel absolutely terrified when there isn’t actually life-threatening danger. It’s awful.