How to Stop a Panic Attack – Three Steps to the Calm
June 11th, 2009
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| How To Stop A Panic Attack |
By Renee Pullman
If you want to learn how to stop a panic attack you need to remember this: sometimes the opposite of what you think is true.
Panic attacks usually start when an anxious thought enters the mind and your body reacts to the thought. Sometimes you feel a reaction in the stomach because there are lots of nerve endings there, sometimes it’s the chest, the body responds in many ways but you know it is a fear response. Your mind tries to move away from this thought, to push it aside, but because of the body’s response your mind cannot seem to help turning it over and over in spite of trying to push it out. The strategy of trying to stop the anxious thought doesn’t work.
Consider something completely different and then I’ll tie it to panic attacks. You are driving your car in the snow and you go into a skid. At that point every instinct about you is telling you to slam on the brakes and turn opposite of the way the car is skidding. Experts tell us to do 3 things to break out of a skid: 1. release the breaks, 2. turn into the skid, 3. accelerate slightly — this works, but go figure.
It is often the same counter-intuitive methods that can stop a panic attack. The thought comes and you begin to feel tension in your body and with every bit of rational thought left in you – you think you’ve got to get rid of the thought; you’ve got to get your mind on something else. You are focused on that one thought and your mind begins to spin out of control and you keep trying to escape the thought. Like the car in a skid the thing that common sense seems to tell you to get out of the skid, out of the anxiety is making it worse.
So how do you stop a panic attack? Like recovering a car from a skid doesn’t follow your instincts, instead here are three quick things to do.
- Let the thought in. Say to yourself that you are doing something different this time that you are not concerned with the thought.
- Label the thought. Say to yourself: this is a fear of and then whatever the fear is about.
- Observe it. Just watch the thought, perhaps it will change and intensify at first, if so go back to step one and go through the three steps again.
And that’s it, a three step strategy that puts you on the way to learning how to stop a panic attack.
Learning how to stop panic attacks is not the intuitive process that we’d like to think. School and society teaches us to think in a linear manner which works fine for some problems. But life is more complicated and you need many different strategies to succeed.
http://www.stopapanicattackfast.com/ is all about dealing with panic and anxiety attacks.
Related articles about panic and anxiety
- What is Anxiety? (psychcentral.com)
- Hugh Grant fears becoming a ‘lonely, sad old man’ (telegraph.co.uk)
- Consciousness, Fear, And Anxiety Dr. Shriniwas Kashalikar (slideshare.net)
- Our ten most common fears… How many do you have? (insidecatholic.com)
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Posted in Healthy Living | 
Tags: causes of panic attacks, fear response, how to stop a panic attack, Stop A Panic Attack
Anxiety disorders are astonishingly common. They include Panic, Phobias (including Agoraphobia and Social Phobia), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Generalised Anxiety Disorder. For many people self-help is a viable way forward and this is why we wrote our book Free Yourself from Anxiety. We aim to show you, step-by-step, how to set up and follow an individually tailored self-help programme.
Part one looks at lifestyle, because very often the way you live is contributing to Anxiety. By making simple changes you can get yourself fit and ready to tackle your Anxiety driven behaviours.
Part two shows you how to challenge your Anxiety in a safe controlled way, by setting small goals that take you gradually towards letting go of anxious behaviours.
Part three shows you how to recognise your anxious thinking, challenge it, and ultimately change it.
Part four explains how to delve into some of the deeper issues that may be driving Anxiety. We also suggest where it might be appropriate for you to seek professional help.
Our aim in this book is to be as comprehensive as possible. Each reader will be able to decide which aspects of the recovery programme they need to complete and which are not relevant to them. In addition we have only discussed proven safe techniques.
Throughout the book we have used the words of Anxiety sufferers who are in various stages of recovery to illustrate our points
The authors
Emma Fletcher is a UK-registered counsellor with 20 years experience of helping anxiety sufferers and of training counsellors and volunteers on anxiety help-lines. She remains firmly committed to the self-help principle and believes that much of her work consists of giving her clients the tools to enable them to live more effectively. This book is an attempt to bring those tools to a wider audience.
Martha Langley is a professional writer and journalist. She has more than 10 years experience as a volunteer on helplines for people dealing with Anxiety and has also been a one-to-one mentor and recovery group leader. This has given her an insight into the difficulties faced by people trying to put self-help techniques into practice. Her aim in Free Yourself from Anxiety was to explain these techniques, to explain the reasoning behind them, and to make practical suggestions that will give every reader the best chance of recovery.
Free Yourself From Anxiety ISBN 978-1- 84528-311-7 is available from bookshops, book websites and Amazon.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Yourself-Anxiety-Self-help-Overcoming/dp/1845283112/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233135806&sr=1-1