Effects of Exercise and Physical Activity on Anxiety

Part that mirrors my own experience:

>Exposing someone with high anxiety sensitivity to the physiological symptoms they fear, such as rapid heartbeat, in the context of physical exercise increases their tolerance for such symptoms (McWilliams and Asmundson, 2001). This exposure reveals that the feared physiological sensations may be uncomfortable, but do not pose a serious threat (Ströhle et al., 2009). Repeated exposures through regular aerobic exercise may also facilitate habituation to the feared sensations (Beck and Shipherd, 1997).

When you feel a panic or anxiety attack coming on, your body is going to start feeling "off", and often this will be accompanied with a massive dump of adrenaline. At that point, your brain is looking for a way to justify why it is feeling super alert and anxious, and will do all kinds of shit to justify what is, at heart, a primarily physiological mechanism. If you only ever experience {sweat, heavy breathing, light-headedness, high heart-rate, energy dump, shakes} in the context of anxiety, any single one of those symptoms starts to pattern-match as "oh god here we go again".

By exercising, you show yourself those symptoms in a context that you have control over and you can (if this reasoning is sound) desensitize yourself to them. Additionally, if you find yourself having a state like this, hopping on a bicycle/going for a run/whatever can help both burn the energy/agitation and also satisfy the flight urge you might experience.

I am not a doctor, this was a way of dealing with a temporary spike in anxiety due to severe burnout, your mileage may vary, etc.