What is a panic attack?
You don’t have to be afraid of panic attacks! Knowing this can be an immense relief. So the next time you have a panic attack, you can take some comfort in the fact that panic attacks have never killed a single soul. There are ways of controlling panic attacks which is great news because they can be quite terrifying!
The fight or flight response is an inbuilt mechanism that helps us cope with dangerous situations. It is there for our survival. When you experience a panic attack, you’re essentially experiencing the fight or flight response, only this is an exaggerated version of it. Strangely, your panic attack is trying to do good thing!
Whenever we experience a dangerous situation, we need to respond immediately. When this happens our adrenaline levels will raise, respiration rate increases and our heart pumps blood around our system faster. This physiological response happens to prepare us to either fight the threat or run away in the opposite direction. We need to respond quickly and therefore our survival mechanism needs to be strong enough and intense enough to be effective.
The difference between a normal fight or flight response and a panic attack, is that the panic attack is out of proportion to the perceived danger. It is an irrational response.
Controlling panic attacks
Typically during a panic attack, you begin to focus on your internal experience. What this means is that you begin to amplify the experience and the intensity begins to worsen. You’ve probably found that the harder you try not to focus on your panic the harder it becomes and just like a vicious circle, it gets worse and worse. You will more than likely begin to catastrophize the situation. This means you begin to think in a very negative way. Thoughts such as “I’m going to die”!
When you begin to notice a change in your awareness that means you begin to notice the onset of a panic attack, here are some things you can do immediately to diffuse the situation:
1) Place your hand on your abdomen and begin to breathe in and out very slowly through your nose.
2) Distract your focus away from yourself by talking to someone nearby or on the phone.
3) Start doing something physical such as going for a jog. This can really help to relieve the tension.
4) Learn how to control the power of your thoughts. For every negative thought you have, think of the exact opposite and imagine the positive thought drowning out any other sounds.
Always remind yourself that panic attacks are not dangerous. They cannot kill you or harm you. It’s very easy to have catastrophic thoughts and every single time you have a negative thought, it is converted into even more anxiety. You can deal with this simply by flipping your thought around and focusing on a positive version. As an example if you were thinking “I’m going to die, I’m going to lose control”, say to yourself “I am a calm and confident person who can handle this calmly”.
Be in control
If you want to learn a very powerful approach for controlling panic attacks and eliminate them for good, then have a look at cure panic attacks today.
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