Thanks
Clinical Psychologist, Psychologist
Panic attacks represent the activation of our body's ‘fight or flight’ response often in the context of stress. Engaging in life style changes to reduce stress and to increase body and mind ‘fitness’ is a good start to reduce physiological hyperarousal and the incidence of ‘false alarms’. However, you problem is not the panic attacks themselves but the fear that you have developed of having them. The fear itself ironically, increases your body's hyperarousal making that which you are fearful-of more likely. Perhaps you have a tendency to worry a little more than most people and you may have developed Panic Disorder. Panic attacks are relatively common in the normal population. However, Panic Disorder involves living in fear of you next panic attack to the point that your ‘life space’ becomes dominated by a vicious cycle of panic attacks, stress and worry about the possibility of further attacks, which provokes more attacks and so on. Panic Disorder is a very ‘treatable’ disorder. I highly recommend that you consult a Clinical Psychologist to help you understand and break the painful cycles.
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Hypnotherapist
The phrase ‘panic attack’ is somewhat scary one. We are not actually ‘attacked’ by anxiety any more than a building is attacked by a fire alarm. It’s important to remember that you don’t cure anxiety as Mariela pointed out its part of our natural inheritance the fight or flight response.
Without anxiety the human race would never have survived.
Hypnotherapy can help you reset your anxiety just like resetting an over-sensitive car alarm that being going off by a gust of wind.
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I think that the clinical health professionals have offered you good ideas.
Sometimes (I am not meaning to invalidate your experiences) panic attacks have a purely physiological basis - shallow breathing, which means that the CO2 levels in your blood can get messed up.
My clinical psychologist taught me this breathing exercise, which has helped me:
(1) Sit with your hands on your stomach around your navel, fingers just touching,
(2) Breathe in deeply so your stomach expands and your fingers move apart.
(3) Count to five and then breathe out so your stomach contracts and your fingers touch again.
(4) Count to five and then go back to (2).
(5) Repeat (2) - (4) for about 15 minutes or so.
This works for me when I (not commonly) get panic attacks.
All the best.
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