Overcoming Panic – Fighting Your Way Back From A Panic Attack

When someone is in the midst of a full blown panic attack, overcoming panic is usually a lot easier said than done. You chest is so tight you have to fight for air, your lungs feel like they’re going to burst and your heart is racing a mile a minute. Your thoughts are whirling round in your head like a tornado and all you can think of is that you are about to die. Each breath you try to take, but can’t, only reinforces that and you start spiraling down into the panic abyss. With each symptom building on the last, your panic gets worse and worse and how in the world is it ever going to be possible for you to stop this? Overcoming panic seems impossible at this point.

One of the most effective therapies for overcoming panic attacks is Cognitive – Behavioral Therapy. This therapy works to change the victim’s thought patterns and behaviors in reaction to the panic attack, with the belief that, people suffering from panic disorder often have a distorted view of the attack, which adds to the intensity of the attacks.

First, the person feels the onset of the panic attack, often a minor symptom like tingling I the fingers or toes, or maybe a slight tightness in the chest. This cause the patient to become anxious. The increased anxiety level then adds to the intensity of the attack, maybe making the chest feel even tighter and causing a shortness of breath and dizziness. These additional symptoms again increase the level of anxiety and there’s a whole snowball effect that results in a full blown panic attack, complete with nausea, headache, shakiness and feelings of doom and death.

Cognitive Therapy focuses on those feelings of anxiety and attempts to have the patient focus on each individual feeling of anxiety and disseminate that particular feeling. or example, a patient who states that during a panic attack they “feel like they are dying” is told that panic attacks do not cause death. And then the next time they have an attack, when they get that feeling, they are able to diminish it by remembering that panic attacks do not cause death. By remembering that panic attacks do not cause death, they are able to break that cycle of thoughts becoming fears, fears becoming anxieties, anxieties becoming panic attacks.

The Behavioral Therapy concentrates on changing the patients behaviors during the attack, with special attention paid to relaxation techniques like visualization and focusing. The therapist encourages the patient to bring on some of the sensations of a panic attack by running to increase the heart rate or breathing rapidly to bring on light headedness or respiratory problems or spinning to create dizziness. Then the therapist teaches the patient to cope with each problem by replacing thoughts like “I am going to die” with thoughts like “I’m just a little dizzy. I can handle this”.

Behavioral Therapy also helps those patients who have been so devastated by their panic attacks that they can no longer leave their house or drive a car. Although these therapies take a little time and effort, they have been shown to be quite effective at overcoming panic.