The symptoms of a panic attack often come from hyperventilation caused by breathing too deeply or quickly. This is why breathing in to a bag can raise CO2 levels in the blood and get a person feeling normal again. "Take deep breaths" is exactly the wrong thing to do in the case of a panic attacks

submitted by magnora7 from en.wikipedia.org

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]jet199 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

From personal experience is the visual representation of your breathe which makes breathing into a bag work. Your brain thinks it's not getting air in but if it can see the bag going in and out it takes note of the feedback and calms down. If it were the CO2 which was important then breathing into other things without the visual stimulus would work, but they don't.

I've also had the same thing work with feeling your breathe. In the Andes I had altitude sickness and started to hyperventilate. One of the locals put alcohol hand sanitiser on her hands and cupped them around my mouth and because I could feel the sting of the alcohol when I breathed in that let my brain know air was going in and it stopped panicing.

As hand sanitiser is now everywhere that's a good quick alternate to use while someone is looking for increasingly rare paper bags.

[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Interesting idea, thanks for sharing