How to slow a racing heart when you’re anxious

To slow a racing heart from anxiety, extend your exhale until it’s longer than your inhale for 30 to 45 seconds, then run 60 to 90 seconds of bilateral stimulation, like the butterfly hug. The longer exhale engages your body’s built-in calming response, and bilateral stimulation lowers arousal further while settling the anxious thought behind it.

Your heart is suddenly pounding hard enough that you can feel it in your throat. Maybe you stood up too fast, maybe a message just landed wrong, maybe there’s no obvious reason at all. Whatever set it off, your chest feels like it’s working overtime, and part of you is already wondering: is this just anxiety, or something you should worry about?

Why does anxiety make your heart race?

A racing or pounding heart is one of the most common physical signs of anxiety, listed among the core symptoms in the National Institute of Mental Health’s materials on panic disorder (NIMH, 2022). It happens because anxiety switches on your sympathetic nervous system, the body’s alarm circuit, which releases epinephrine (adrenaline) into your bloodstream. Epinephrine binds to receptors on your heart and speeds it up, part of an old, automatic response built to get you ready to fight or flee (StatPearls, 2024).

Here’s the reassuring part: that hormone doesn’t stick around. Epinephrine breaks down within minutes of being released (StatPearls, 2024). Your heart keeps racing only as long as your body keeps producing a fresh supply, which is usually only as long as your mind keeps reading the moment as a threat.

If a racing heart shows up again and again in similar moments, that’s rarely only about what’s happening today. Our guide to panic sensations goes deeper on where a recurring pattern like this tends to start.

How do you slow it down right now?

This protocol pairs two things: a breathing pattern shown to calm physical arousal, and bilateral stimulation, the technique at the center of EMDR, to calm the anxious thought that’s often driving it.

Step 1: Extend your exhale for 30 to 45 seconds

Breathe in through your nose, then let your exhale run longer than your inhale, roughly twice as long if you can manage it. Your heart rate naturally rises a little on the inhale and eases on the exhale, a reflex tied to your vagus nerve and baroreflex. Stretching out the exhale leans into that natural dip: a 2017 trial found a similar slow, paced-breathing approach improves mood and lowers blood pressure more than faster-paced breathing does (Steffen et al., 2017). A 2023 trial in Cell Reports Medicine found that cyclic sighing, a similar exhale-focused pattern practiced daily, lowered resting breathing rate and improved mood more than a month of mindfulness meditation did.

Step 2: Run 60 to 90 seconds of bilateral stimulation

Bilateral stimulation (BLS) is the rhythmic left-right input at the center of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. Pick one:

• Butterfly hug: cross your arms over your chest, hands on opposite upper arms, and tap left, right, left, right at a steady pace. EMDRIA describes this self-administered method as built for exactly this kind of moment.
• Eye movements: move your gaze steadily between two points about shoulder-width apart.
• Alternating taps: tap your knees or thighs, left, right, left, right, if a racing heart has your hands feeling too unsteady for the butterfly hug.

Keep your attention loosely on your heartbeat while you do this, rather than trying to ignore it. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs this same left-right technique through an on-screen moving target or alternating tones, paced however you like, in the web app. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation walks through choosing a method and pacing it well.

Step 3: Check in, and repeat if it’s still racing

Check in again: how activated do you feel, roughly 0 to 10? Still high? Run another 30 seconds of extended-exhale breathing, then another round of bilateral stimulation. Most people notice a real shift within two to three minutes.

Why add bilateral stimulation instead of just breathing?

Breathing calms the physical spike, but a racing heart is rarely only physical. It usually comes paired with a thought running just underneath it, something’s wrong, what if this doesn’t stop, and that thought is part of what keeps the sympathetic signal firing. A 2025 study in BJPsych Open found that bilateral stimulation lowered autonomic arousal, the body’s alert state, in both people with PTSD and healthy volunteers with no trauma history, regardless of whether they used eye movements or tactile taps.

That calming effect showed up whether or not people were recalling something stressful, which is why pairing it with your breathing, rather than breathing alone, gives you two levers instead of one. If it’s the whole fight-or-flight response you’re trying to power down, not just your heart rate, our body-first reset covers that wider pattern.

Is this anxiety, or could it be something more serious?

Most racing hearts in anxious moments are exactly that: anxiety, not a heart problem. But the American Heart Association is direct about this: panic and cardiac symptoms can feel alike, and you can’t reliably tell them apart yourself (American Heart Association, 2022). Treat new, unusual, or worsening chest pain, especially pain spreading to your arm, jaw, or back, as a medical emergency every time, not something to breathe through first.

Outside of an emergency, get a racing heart checked by a doctor if it happens with no clear trigger, wakes you from sleep, or keeps recurring despite a calmer stretch of life. If chest tightness is the bigger piece of what you’re feeling, tight chest from stress covers that pattern specifically.

A racing heart is uncomfortable, not dangerous, in the vast majority of anxious moments. Give your body a clear signal that the threat has passed, through your breath and through bilateral stimulation, and it usually listens faster than you’d expect. For more resets built the same way, our body stress collection has the full set.