Self Help For Anxiety Attacks – How to Prevent Attacks by Breaking Your Cycle of Anxiety
The best help for anxiety attacks is self help. Particularly because a critical factor in anxiety attacks is your ‘fear’ of having another one. If you can rid yourself of this fear then you can prevent further anxiety (panic) attacks. Here, you’ll discover how your fear of another anxiety attack can actually trigger one, and, how you, yourself are the only person who can eliminate that fear and prevent more anxiety attacks.
As an anxiety sufferer who has experienced the symptoms of an anxiety or panic attack, whether you are consciously aware or not, you will be worried about having another attack. And why wouldn’t you? Let us be honest, the symptoms are absolutely terrifying aren’t they? The totality of all the symptoms led you to believe you were about to die, so there’s no way that you wish to go through that again.
Now your ‘fear’ is such a powerful force that it has a real effect on your general anxiety. What happens is that your constant fear adds to your already higher-than-normal anxiety levels. By doing so your fear raises these levels even higher. They can be raised so high that the stress of a normal everyday event can then push your anxiety way beyond what your body expects.
Your unconscious mind then ‘sees’ this (quite wrongly) as a life-threatening situation and reacts as it has for thousands of years; by priming your mind and body to either fight or run away. We call this the ‘fight or flight’ response. You see, your unconscious mind can’t tell the difference between reality and non-reality. All it knows is that you’re in a highly stressed situation. It then takes no chances and assumes you are in danger.
The horrible symptoms you experience are the result of your brain very quickly organizing things to give you the best chance of survival. For example, blood is short-circuited from your stomach to your important muscle groups. Your pupils dilate to let in more light so you can see better. Breathing becomes faster for more oxygen. Your heart pumps faster to deliver the blood faster. And so on.
So I hope you can see now that the symptoms of anxiety attacks are just your body’s natural reaction to a ‘perceived’ threat. You aren’t going off your head, and, you aren’t going to die.
I know this is a lot to take in so, if you want to, please go back over what you’ve read so far. It is important to get a good grasp before we deal with your fear factor…
Okay, now let’s deal with your fear. You can see from the above that your fear is only one part of an ‘anxiety cycle’ that goes something like this >>> anxiety attack >>> fear >>> increased anxiety >>> anxiety attack >>> fear >>> increased anxiety >>> etc. Your anxiety is feeding off your fear, so that by concentrating on your anxiety alone (as drug-based meds do by trying to control your ‘mood’) you aren’t addressing the real problem, which is your ‘fear’ of having more anxiety attacks.
The key is to remove your fear factor first. This breaks your cycle of anxiety, which in turn prevents anxiety attacks, and, then makes it easier to address and ultimately cure your general anxiety.
So how do you get rid of your fear? You must take back control from your fear and diffuse it. You do this by meeting your fear face-to-face, quite literally. In basic terms you have to be prepared to have an anxiety attack! I know this goes counter to what you would think but it’s what you have to do. Instead of running away from your fear which amplifies it, you must embrace it totally and diffuse it.
As an example try this right now: make yourself have an anxiety attack. Nothing happened right? Okay, try again then. It isn’t going to happen. Why? Because you faced your fear of another attack by trying to trigger one. In doing so you dissipated your fear and so nothing happened.
This is just a small experiment, and clearly if that’s all you had to do, no one would be suffering from anxiety attacks anymore. Of course, it’s a bit more complex than that, but that gave you an idea of just how successful this can be with the proper technique, like the ‘ONE MOVE’ technique outlined below.
But even if all you’ve taken from this report is a realization that your next anxiety attack won’t harm you, then you’ll have taken a good positive step forward.
John Cielo researches and writes on self help for anxiety attacks. To discover the simple ‘ONE MOVE’ technique that will eliminate your fear factor and so break your vicious cycle of anxiety, please go here now http://eliminatepanicattacks.blogspot.com and get your old self back again.
Author: John Cielo
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Digital Camera Information
