Coping With Panic Attacks

[[na...]]

Sometimes a counselor will give a homework assignment. My "Anxiety & Phobia Workbook" has a chapter on coping with Panic Attacks as they happen in real time. Here are a few snippets you might find useful. The point of the chapter is that panic attacks are not dangerous, and there are techniques to deal with them as well as reduce their intensity and frequency. After explaining in detail that Panic Attacks are not dangerous, the workbook goes on to give techniques for coping.

 

Quotes:

 

"In a spontaneous panic attack, your body goes through exactly the same physiological flight reaction that it does in a truly life-threatening situation. The panic attack that wakes you up at night or occurs out of the blue is physiologically indistinguishable from your response to such ­experiences as your car ­stalling on the railroad tracks or waking to hear a robber going through your house."

 

"These intense bodily ­reactions occur in the absence of any immediate or apparent danger. Because there is no immediate or apparent external danger in a panic attack, you may tend to invent or attribute danger to the intense bodily sensations you’re going through. In the absence of any real life-threatening situation, your mind may misinterpret what’s going on inside as being life-threatening. Your mind can very quickly go through the following process: “If I feel this bad, I must be in some ­danger. If there is no apparent external danger, the danger must be inside of me.” And so it’s very ­common when undergoing panic to invent any (or all) of the following “dangers”:

 

In response to heart palpitations: “I’m going to have a heart attack” or “I’m going to die.”

 

In response to choking sensations: “I’m going to stop breathing and suffocate.”

 

In response to dizzy sensations: “I’m going to pass out.”

 

In response to sensations of disorientation or feeling “not all there”: “I’m going crazy.”

 

In response to “rubbery legs”: “I won’t be able to walk” or “I’m going to fall.”

 

In response to the overall intensity of your body’s reactions: “I’m going to lose complete control over myself.”

 

"As soon as you tell yourself that you’re feeling any of the above dangers, you multiply the intensity of your fear. This intense fear makes your bodily reactions even worse, which in turn ­creates still more fear, and you get caught in an upward spiral of mounting panic. This upward spiral can be avoided if you understand that what your body is going through is not dangerous. All of the above dangers are illusory, a product of your imagination when you’re undergoing the intense reactions that constitute panic. There is simply no basis for any of them in ­reality."

[[am...]]

Thank you for sharing this

[[Fl...]]

my therapist and I discuss what you wrote above in the terms (his) of my "irrational fears".

 

I can't argue with him that everything that I fear, leaving house, shopping, talking on phone, opening mail, going to appts (other than him), have no true basis to make me afraid.

I don't fear people. Never have. But I have a fear of ....for some reason, not being at home! I fear the fear? I fear feeling panic rising? Can I not calm myself down? Yes, I actually can now and I must continue to believe I can, to read and believe in him, myself, the stuff like what you wrote about --- as I know it to be the way out of this prison I lock myself in. Panic or no panic, no one is going to hurt me other than myself by isolating.

 

I keep working on this.

Thanks for posting, Nathan. Good stuff.

[[am...]]

Hi Flowerpower,

 

I too have experienced crippling panic attacks and they are definitely scarey. That is all that they are though and after you have enough of them I learned to just accept them and say to myself that I know that it isn't going to hurt me so I am not going to worry about it and the panic goes away. This may sound over simplistic, but you really can learn to just accept the worst that can happen to you and after you accept it, it no longer happens. It is the fear of the fear that causes the attacks.

 

Good luck !

 

Patrick