Panic and anxiety attacks are no laughing matter; they can seriously ruin your life if you let them. Luckily, you have many choices for how to deal with them. In this article, you'll learn about the three categories and which you should be using.
These categories are chemical, physical, and mental. There is a place and time where each is useful, and you may actually use all of them in the battle against panic and anxiety attacks.
Chemical is one of the most popular. The problem is, the pills aren't as good as they seem. Some have side effects, some are habit forming, but those aren't the reasons I'm against a huge focus on them. They help with the symptoms, but they do nothing to address the underlying problem. If you don't deal with the source of the problem on your own, you'll be taking those pills for the rest of your life. It is better to use them only temporarily so you can relax and focus on learning the methods you can use and thought patterns you can adopt in order to reduce the anxiety that leads to the attacks.
Next is the physical category. You can gain quite a bit of traction in the physical category, but it won't eliminate the problem by itself. The attacks occur as a result of extreme mental unrest, but the state your body is in will draw your mind to the same state. By dealing with physical stress, you are helping to relax your mind 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.
Exercise and sleep both play important roles in helping you to deal with stress. Taking the right things into your body also helps. Keep your distance from sleeping pills, high quantities of sodium, and most of the common vices people have, such as nicotine, caffeine, drugs, and alcohol. Panic attacks can actually be caused by some of the substances listed, merely increased in likelihood of occurrence by others.
Last on the list is the mental. 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. To reduce or eliminate stress, all you have to do is to reshape these behaviors in an empowering manner.
The crowd favorite here is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). This is actually a fairly broad category of psychotherapy, so there is a fair variety of techniques that can be utilized inside of it. Commonly, the process it uses for dealing with panic and anxiety attacks includes the patient writing down thoughts and feelings attached to stresses or significant events throughout 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.
New patterns or associations can be created during exposure therapy. This also falls under the umbrella of CBT. It repeatedly exposes the patient to a stress, physically or mentally, in a controlled environment. The helps your brain to recognize that these events do not require a fight or flight response.
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