Showing posts with label anxiety attacks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anxiety attacks. Show all posts

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Tips on How to Stop an Anxiety Attack Dead in Its Tracks

There are many people who have experienced anxiety attacks and they have become a daily part of their lives. Keep in mind that although this condition has a great impact on your life, with a little time and patience, it is possible to learn how to control, prevent, and stop an anxiety attack dead in its tracks.

In order to learn how to stop an anxiety attack, it would b helpful to understand the symptoms and causes them.

Many sufferers only experience an attack when a specific event or situation happens. If you go back in time and try to remember the first instances that made you feel this way, you can sometimes pin-point what initially happened to you that now triggers these episodes.

This is not always easy to do, especially if have been having this problem for some time. If this is the case, you are experiencing generalized anxiety.

When you do find yourself in the middle of an anxiety attack, you will definitely wish that you had a magic bullet to stop an anxiety attack.

Here are several things that you can do to stop this before it escalates into something bigger.

You can stop an anxiety attack by calming yourself down and concentrating on your your breathing. This will help to bring your heart rate back down to normal, as well as, the rate of your breathing.

On top of everything else you're feeling, during an attack, you don't want to hyperventilate, which will further disturb the chemical balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide in you body.

You can avoid this by telling yourself that all you are experiencing is an attack, and nothing more serious is going on with you. You must keep in mind that this is nothing more than anxiety, and you can control it.

You must tell yourself that it is the anxiety which is causing you to think and respond as if there is more going on with you than there really is.

Once you know that you are only having an anxiety attack and that everything is going to be alright with you, then you are ready for the next step.

Concentrating and focusing on your own breathing can be helpful as well. Taking a few deep breathes in and out slowly, will help you heart rate go down and will make you feel calmer.

It's important to practice the concept of "going with the flow" of an anxiety attack. The more you fight a panic episode, the worse and longer lasting it will be. Let it run its course, which will last for 10-20 minutes.

Although this seems like a lifetime, this is a wiser way of dealing with this problem. The more you practice this type of reaction to your episodes, the easier and more effective this will become.

To stop these episodes, you must let go of the habitual reaction to it, by remembering you are not in an actual battle. As the name implies, there is not an actual physical attack coming at you. So attempting to control it, puts you in a defense mode that isn't necessary.

This is what causes the "fight flight" response that I'm sure you have heard of. It is because of this that you essentially experience the physical symptoms of this disorder. The constant fear of having another attack, is what feeds this condition on a mental level.

If nothing seems to be working for you, there is a simple strategy that other people are using to stomp their attacks in their tracks. It was designed by a former sufferer, and you may find it will bring you relief also. Whatever you do, don't ever accept your panic attacks as something that you're just going to have to learn to live with. There is hope, as long as you remain open to your options. Click HERE for FREE Information on how to stop an anxiety attack.

Louise Alexander - EzineArticles Expert Author

Anxiety Attacks - Why Am I Frightened For No Reason?

Before I go any further, I must apologize if I sometimes seem a bit 'flip' in the way I write about Anxiety and Panic Attacks. Equally, I'm not one of these writers who knows nothing about the subject, but thinks it might be rather fun to write about. Please believe me when I say that I've experienced every symptom and condition about which I write. It's just that hopefully a little bit of humour here and there may just lighten the burden a little beneath which so many of you are struggling.

Further Causes of Anxiety Attacks.

Why am I frightened for no reason? Probably the commonest and most reasonable question of all. For a person who's just experienced their first attack, the answers to this question are myriad. The two most prevalent would be that you're in a continual state of stress which culminates in an Anxiety Attack. The stress has to burst out somewhere at some time, hence you suffer an attack. Or, it may be the result of a festering mental wound. A high injustice done to you years before, perhaps. Maybe a terrible secret that you've held close to you for a long time. Something along those lines that's simmered away in your mind, never quite going away, always with you when you awake until you finally fall asleep. There are many other reasons, but those are two that could cause your current distress.

However, if you've already experienced an Anxiety Attack, today's thinking posits that we're terrified of having another attack. Unless there is indeed something lurking at the back of our minds as already described. But let's suppose there is no outside danger of any sort that frightens us. Therefore, it comes from within, and it makes sense that it isn't just the attack that frightens us. It's the losing control. Quite probably, if you were to ask a number of people to name their greatest fear and gave them sufficient time to think about it, quite a number would reply that losing control of any situation in which they find themselves is their worst fear.

After all, if you felt an attack coming on while you were standing in line at the grocery store, you'd almost certainly leave the premises immediately. The real reason? Because if you didn't, you'd probably stand in the middle of the store and scream, thereby losing control. People would rush to you to assist you and attention is the last thing you seek. They'd help you. You don't need help. If they help you, it means you can't help yourself, therefore you've lost control. There again, there are other reasons, but the researchers and scientists say that fear of losing control is the main one

Mike Bond with further reasons for Anxiety Attacks, this time more mental than physical. Make sure you fly on fingers of light to Mike's Website, Panattack, making absolutely certain you collect your copy of the Free Mini Course which has helped so many people.

Mike Bond - EzineArticles Expert Author