My friend, as a CBT/Clinical Hypnotherapist, I see this quite often, and when I regress my patients, they tend to have an incident that occurred in there past. for instance I once treated a pt. who felt like you,the woman is 37 Y/O, when I regressed her, there was an incident which occurred, when she was 16 y/o, she was not among the popular in school, and but she was quite bright. Now, it is summertime, and she is with her girlfriend at the beach, a boy from school, came running by, and told her, that he wanted to tell her something, but did not know how to put it. she got very excited,what is it. he then said the words you are FAT, this sent a domino effect in her mind, that changed her self confidence, it was only in regression therapy, that these hidden thoughts were able to come out. at this point we change the association to these pictures, gave them new meaning, and today she is doing amazing. there are exercises that can be done. start with controlling your breath, when doing this , it calms the mind, and number 2, look for distractions. if your thoughts tend to overwhelm you, look outside, count how many people you see, or how many mailboxes, you get the point. I hope this is helpful, please feel free to contact me, if you would like other exercises to help you when in crisis mode