3 Approaches for Dealing With Anxiety and Panic Attacks ...

Those who have experienced them know that anxiety and panic attacks can be crippling to your quality of life. There are many techniques and methods you can utilize to help reduce or eliminate them though. In this article, you?ll learn about the three categories and which you should be using.

The three categories are the physical, the mental, and the chemical. Each shines in its own place, and, in order for you to overcome the attacks, you may have to utilize all three.

We?ll start with the chemical, as that seems to be the most valued, at least in theory. Pills to help with the attacks seem much better than they actually are. I don?t recommend a disproportionate focus on them. They are designed to treat the symptoms, not the problem. You?ll have to take them for the rest of your life if the problem is never dealt with. Feel free to use them for relief until you learn how to deal with the problem, as I know how distressing the attacks can be, but be careful with which you choose.

The physical category is the next one to address. Using physical strategies and techniques can help you to gain some momentum in dealing with the attacks. It may not seem obvious why this category will help since the attacks result from mental unrest, but your mind reflects the state your body is in. When you can relieve physical stress, mental stress will be alleviated as well. The most common recommendation seems to be taking slow, deep breaths. This sort of breathing helps to calm the body, clear the mind, and is the opposite of what the attacks normally guide your breathing to. You can use a physical gesture to anchor in certain feelings, but that is a much more involved technique.

Exercise and sleep both play important roles in helping you to deal with stress. Absorbing the right nutrients and staying away from certain substances also helps tremendously. Try a low sodium diet while avoiding sleeping pills, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and drugs. Some substances on the list can actually cause panic attacks.

Finally there is the mental category. There are many techniques and therapies you can utilize here. By learning to control your perceptions you also learn to control how your mind behaves. When those behaviors are reshaped in a positive manner, you can eliminate stress or anxiety.

The crowd favorite here is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT is a broad category of psychotherapy, so it has a big arsenal of approaches to help out. Often it will involve a patient writing down thoughts and feelings associated with major events or stresses during the day. This helps to map out your associations and the patterns that lead to stress in your life. Destructive patterns can be short-circuited to prevent panic and anxiety attacks.

Through repetition you can create new associations or patterns as is done during exposure therapy. It is a subcategory of CBT. It exposes someone to a stress repeatedly in a controlled environment. This can be with a focus on the physical or the mental. The helps your brain to recognize that these events do not require a fight or flight response.

For more information on what to do during a panic attack visit our what to do when having a panic attack page.

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