Stop Panic Attacks Starting Right Now
Filed under: Anxiety & Panic Resources, Articles, Random Thoughts
After living with anxiety and panic for 17 years, I know what it’s like when you desperately want to stop panic attacks. And I’d like to share a quick idea with you that I discovered a couple of years back. It’s something I used as part of my efforts to get over my severe anxiety, and if it worked for me, perhaps it can work for you too.
It’s all about focusing your attention on other people who have the same goal - to stop panic attacks.
I found great inspiration to see other people winning their own battles with these kinds of problems, and I’m sure it played a part in my eventual recovery.
One of the best ways I found for doing this was to find videos on the various video sharing sites. Quite a few people who suffer with panic attacks and severe anxiety seem to like to make little video diaries, or video blogs, where they talk about their own experiences, the progress they’re making, and the approaches they’ve taken that have worked.
Another great thing about these video sharing sites is that you can leave comments under the video, or in some cases even contact the creator of the video directly. I met a couple of people this way who turned into good friends, and we all learned a lot from each other about our various panic disorders.
So if this is something you haven’t tried, why not visit a couple of video sharing sites, take a look around, watch some videos, and see what it inspires in you? If it proves to be even half as effective as it was for me, you might just find that it plays a big part in helping to stop panic attacks completely.
Treat Panic Disorder By Creating Your Very Own Masterplan
Filed under: Anxiety & Panic Resources, Articles, Panic Attack Help, Random Thoughts
Back when I was trying to treat panic disorder I was a little lost. I didn’t know where to turn, or what to try. Some things I gave a shot, and I made a little progress. Other things I tried and made none. But my biggest problem was that I had no real plan of attack. I didn’t know what I was trying to achieve.
So when I realised this I started developing something that I’d like to share with you today, and I think if you make use of this idea you’ll have a great new way to treat panic disorder.
I called it my “masterplan.”
It was a combination of short-term goals, and long-term goals, and a way to track them.
I think it’s vital to have a long-term goal that you’d like to achieve (your ultimate goal), and many short-term goals (little baby steps you’d like to achieve along the way.). And just as important as those goals is an effective way to track them.
So first of all, decide on your long-term goal and write it down. Then plot out all the baby step goals that will take you from where you are now to your ultimate goal. When you see an entire plan laid out like this ic can be very inspiring, because it makes your long-term goal suddenly seem so easy to reach.
When you’ve got all your goals written down, start monitoring your progress towards them in a daily journal. You can either do this in a little diary, or maybe even an online blog. Nothing fancy - just a quick note of the progress you made that day, and if you’ve achieved or got nearer to any of your short-term, or baby step, goals.
Having a masterplan like this can produce incredible results, and I think if you stick with it you will have a great new weapon in your arsenal to treat panic disorder.
Overcoming Panic Disorder With The 3 Steps I Used
Overcoming panic disorder is impossible to achieve, in my opinion, without 3 things. Those things are hope, optimism, and modelling. Without these 3 things, I would never have overcome my own problems with panic disorder.
In fact, for many years I tried everything I could think of to help myself, and absolutely nothing I tried worked. It was only when I focused all of my efforts and attention on hope, optimism, and modelling that I finally started to make good progress.
The great thing is, you can learn from my years of mistakes, because through all my efforts I stumbled across an approach that I passionately believe can work for you too.
And the approach I’d like to share with you is based solely on the third vital aspect I mentioned a moment ago - modelling.
Modelling, in case the idea is one you’ve never come across before, is essentially choosing someone who has achieved something you would like to achieve, and “modelling” your life and your behaviour on them. If you do this well enough, and for long enough, then you should achieve the same goals they’ve achieved.
So this comes down to focusing all your effort and attention on people who’ve had some form of panic disorder and overcome it. Find a handful of these people, find out what they did, and copy it.
The best way I know to do this is to find books written by people who once had problems with anxiety and panic disorders. There are lots of these books around, and a few minutes spent searching online will turn up more than you could ever need.
Simply by going through these books, and being exposed to people who’ve beaten anxiety and panic, you’ll rediscover your hope and optimism (the first two things I said you’ll need if overcoming panic disorders is your goal). And the third thing you’ll need (the modelling) will come from focusing your attention on one or two of the authors of these books, finding out what they did to stop their anxiety and panic, and doing the same things in your own life.
This three-pronged approach to overcoming panic disorders is one I really believe in, and if you give it a try and stick with it, I think it could really help you.
Control Panic Attacks - Anti-Anxiety Breathing Could Be The Answer
One of the very best ways to control panic attacks is to change the way you breathe.
This “retraining” of your breathing can lead to many positive effects if you currently live with anxiety or panic disorders, including the elimination of unpleasant physical symptoms, decreased nervousness, decreased depression, and even complete elimination of panic attacks.
So, why can changing one little thing like breathing help in so many different ways?
There are a couple of reasons. First, you will correct the oxygen/carbon dioxide imbalance you probably have at the moment (most people with severe anxiety suffer this imbalance due to years of shallow breathing - a result of being nervous and on the edge of panic for so long). And the second reason that this breathing change can have so many benefits is because correct breathing leads to increased calmness and relaxation.
So, let’s get to the good stuff. How do you “retrain” yourself to breathe correctly?
It’s simple.
A few times a day, you’re going to force yourself to breathe correctly (I’ll tell you how in a moment). To begin with, this will feel awkward and you’ll have to concentrate to get it right. But after a few days of doing this your body will begin to develop a “breathing memory,” and even when you’re not doing the retraining exercises you will be breathing as you should be.
Here’s the exercise for you to do, a few times each day.
Sit upright in a chair. Place your hand on your stomach. Breathe in for 4 seconds. While you breathe in, slowly press your stomach out against your hand. Now breathe out for 4 seconds. While you breathe out, let your stomach flatten again under your hand. Do this for 3 to 5 minutes, a few times a day.
This is how you are supposed to breathe, but most people with anxiety don’t breathe like this. Soon, you will retrain your body to breathe this way even when you’re not doing the exercise.
This will reduce your day-to-day anxiety greatly, and as a bonus, it’s one of the very best ways to control panic attacks. Give this exercise a try!
Your Anxiety Cure Could Be 1 Step Away
If you’re currently looking for an anxiety cure, then I’ve got one word for you: sleep.
I lived with severe anxiety for over 17 years, and one of the big things that I focused on that lead to my recovery was sleep. And if you have any kind of anxiety or panic disorder then it won’t be a surprise to you that sleep plays such a big role in how we feel and how severe our anxiety is on any given day.
When my anxiety was at its worst my sleep was almost non-existent. I would sometimes go an entire week on a total of less than an hour of sleep. And that made my anxiety 10 times worse than it would have otherwise been.
And this can easily develop into a vicious circle that’s close to impossible to break out of.
You have anxiety, you can’t sleep, you have more anxiety that you can’t sleep, you sleep even less, and so on, and so on. It can quickly become a nightmare.
But there’s good news.
If you follow a few simple “sleep rules,” you can quickly and dramatically increase the amount of sleep you have, and also increase the quality of the sleep you have. So try sticking to these 3 rules from now on, and I’m sure it’ll help you a lot. Who knows, it may even turn out to be the first step towards finding your very own anxiety cure.
1. Go to bed at the same time each night and get up at the same time each morning. To get truly healthy, restful sleep your body needs to develop a routine. This step is vital.
2. Avoid anything stimulating for an hour before you go to bed. Again, for truly restful, relaxing sleep your body needs to be in a calm state as you drift off. So no exercise, caffeine, or stimulating TV for an hour before bed.
3. Don’t use your bed for anything other than sleep and sex. You want your bed to be a place your mind subconsciously links with relaxation and almost zero activity. So no reading, eating, watching TV, or talking on the phone in bed.
Follow these 3 rules as best you can and you’ll be one huge step closer to finding your anxiety cure.
Stop Panic Attacks With This Quick 1 Step Plan
Filed under: Anxiety & Panic Resources, Articles, Panic Attack Help
If you want to stop panic attacks there a handful of things that you must ensure you’re getting right, before you move onto any of the more complex tactics you might come across.
One of these “musts” is exercise.
Exercise is one of the very best ways to control and to stop panic attacks. This is true for many reasons, some of which are: you will increase your blood flow, meaning more vital nutrients and oxygen are distributed throughout your body; you will work your heart out, which leads to a naturally slow-beating heart when at rest - a real bonus to someone who has extreme anxiety and often suffers with palpitations; you will cause more endorphins to be released by your brain, causing a natural “high” that leads to a happier state of mind and considerably decreased anxiety levels.
So the benefits of exercise are obvious for people who are trying to stop panic attacks. But that doesn’t mean that everyone with severe anxiety and panic-related problems actually get up and do any! And a big part of that, for many people, is not knowing where to start, and not wanting the expense or the inconvenience of things such as gym memberships or buying exercise equipment.
But here’s the great news.
Exercise is physical activity beyond what you would normally do. So that includes walking up stairs, walking further than you currently do, gardening. Pretty much anything!
So you can start to enjoy the benefits of “exercise” right now simply by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking your car farther from the store to give you a longer walk, caring for your yard or garden once a week, and so on. You get the picture, I’m sure.
They key here is that there are things you can start doing right now, today, that will genuinely be exercise, and you’ll experience all the benefits I listed just now.
So try making some of these tiny changes right now. It’s one of the most powerful and underused tactics out there when you want to stop panic attacks.
How To Cure Panic Attacks With Rediscovered Hope
Would you like to know how to cure panic attacks by making one simple change to your life? What if I told you there was one thing you could change, right now, and it would give you the power to stop 99% of your anxiety and panic, and as a bonus, also stop the horrible physical symptoms associated with anxiety and panic?
Such a thing exists.
But most people either never use it effectively, or they choose to ignore it because they don’t realise its true power.
This “thing” is hope.
Were you expecting something more spectacular? Something more impressive? Well, get over your disappointment fast, because when you realise the true power of hope, and what it can do for you, you’ll suddenly see that it is spectacular and it is impressive.
When it comes to hope, most people who want to know how to cure panic attacks have one thing in common: they have none of it. No hope. Zero.
Over time, one day at a time, the hope has faded and then finally gone altogether. That’s why so many people with anxiety and panic disorders just live with an acceptance that this is the way their lives will always be.
Don’t be one of those people!
I was one of those people for years and years. But on the day I got my hope back I immediately starting making rapid progress. And what did that do? Well, it gave me more hope, and that caused an even bigger surge of progress.
This cycle of hope and progress causes a snowball effect, and before too long your anxiety and panic can be a thing of the past.
The great thing is, all you have to do right now to get your hope back is just to allow it back into your life. Start being optimistic. Start looking for things to inspire you. I promise you, if you open up your mind and start looking for these things, you’ll find them.
They’re out there, but we’re blind to them while we have no hope. By just believing in your heart that there’s a way through this, you’ll suddenly see things and find things that have been right there, under your nose, all this time.
Hope is the single biggest weapon you have against panic and anxiety. Don’t let it go to waste.
End Panic Attacks By Striking At Their Biggest Weakness: The Fact That They Don’t Exist
The single biggest breakthrough I had when I was trying to end panic attacks was my realisation that my panic and anxiety were imaginary.
That might sound a bit weird to you - my anxiety and panic were imaginary?
Don’t worry, I’ll explain.
I read this book, The Gift of Fear (written by Gavin De Becker), and in it he talked a lot about what fear was, what causes it, and how to control it. It turns out that fear is really just a defence mechanism that has been with us (humans) for tens of thousands of years.
The book also said that despite the fact that most of us think of intense fear as paralysing, it’s actually energising. It doesn’t make us freeze, it makes us act. Genuine fear is there for one reason - to make us aware of something that’s dangerous to us, and to make us act to avoid or escape whatever that danger is.
When I read this in the book I made a big breakthrough.
I suddenly realised that if genuine fear was short-lived like this (and there only to make us act), then the constant, relentless fear I was feeling all day every day as part of my anxiety obviously could not be genuine fear at all.
It was imaginary.
This was my biggest leap forward in my efforts to end panic attacks, and it lead to many more breakthroughs and my eventual full recovery.
I’ve done my best to explain (in my limited time with you) this concept of anxiety-based fear being imaginary, but I really think you’ll benefit a lot from reading The Gift of Fear. So go and get a copy as soon as possible, read it, and experience the same breakthrough I did when I read it.
Like me, it could help you end panic attacks sooner than you think.
Curing Panic Attacks With The Power of Goal Setting
Filed under: Anxiety & Panic Resources, Articles, Panic Attack Help
Curing panic attacks can be a real battle. I know from personal experience. I lived with panic and anxiety for 17 years. I tried pretty much everything you can imagine, and almost none of it produced any positive results.
But the one thing I did that made a huge difference was to take full advantage of the power of goal-setting.
For most of my time battling through panic and anxiety I had goals, of course. For a start, I wanted the panic attacks to stop. That was my number one goal - they were ruining my life. Another of my goals was to feel normal again. I just wanted a normal life, the same as everyone around me had. And then there was another goal - this one to no longer feel fear all day every day.
So I had goals, and I’d been trying to use these goals to inspire me to get better.
But what I didn’t realise was, these goals were too vague and too non-specific for someone curing panic attacks. I mean, how do you measure “feeling normal again”?
It was around the time I realised my goals weren’t specific enough that I heard a motivational speaker explain an exercise you can do. It’s all about writing down your dream day in the future. You put down every detail of how you want your life to be at some chosen point in the future.
In my case, I chose a year in the future, and I wrote 2 pages of how a day in my life would be then. Everything from what I’d eat for breakfast, right through to what time I’d go to bed (and everything in between).
Doing this exercise puts your mind in super-sharp focus, and it will subconsciously start going after the very specific life you outlined in your “dream day in the future” exercise.
So I highly recommend you do this exercise for yourself. It can make a huge difference when curing panic attacks is you dream goal.
Treating Panic Attacks The Easy Way
I lived with severe panic and anxiety for over seventeen years, and during that time I discovered that treating panic attacks is far easier if you can develop a basic understanding of how the mind works.
For me, this was the big breakthrough.
I’m not talking about studying psychology day and night here. I’m talking about learning a few of the basics about how you think, what causes you to feel and act certain ways, and what you can do to change your behaviour and your thoughts.
So that’s how I beat my panic disorder.
But if you’re anything like I was, then you won’t really know where to begin when you set out to learn about all this stuff. And that’s what I’m writing about today. I’m going to make a single book recommendation that I believe can teach you all you need to know about your mind, how it works, and how to get control of it.
The book is called “50 Psychology Classics,” and it’s written by a man called Tom Butler-Bowden.
What’s great about this book is that the author has done all the hard work for you. He’s read hundreds of books on psychology and the human mind, and he’s selected the 50 most important ones. And he’s written one chapter for each of those 50 books, summarising what the book teaches.
So by the time you’ve read this book, you’ll have the knowledge of someone who’s read all 50 of the books it covers. This is great for two reasons. One, you’ll instantly know enough to make treating panic attacks simple. And two, you’ll come across a couple of books that seem very interesting to you and suit your own situation, and you’ll be able to follow up by reading those all the way through.
Learning to understand my mind and how it works was a huge factor in my full recovery, and a large part of it was down to what I learned in this book I’m recommending you read. So go and get yourself a copy today and start benefiting from it the same way I did. When you’re treating panic attacks, I believe this will be your number one resource.
