Panic Attacks and Panic Disorder - Prevention

By Jeannette Curtis


Prevention
Although panic disorder cannot be prevented, you may be able to prevent or reduce the number of additional panic attacks with proper treatment. Simply avoiding certain situations or places does not guarantee that a panic attack will not occur under new circumstances. In fact, avoiding situations and places where panic attacks have occurred often increases your level of anxiety.

You may be able to reduce the severity of future attacks if you follow home treatment practices such as:

Reducing anxiety and limiting triggers like caffeine and alcohol.
Continuing medical treatment and counseling, such as exposure therapy.
Calling your doctor if symptoms recur or get worse
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Panic Attack and Your Imagination

People who experience panic attacks will often say that
they feel out of control as soon as the panic is in full swing.

Christian Nevell Bovee once wrote:



“Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over
to the enemy of our imagination.”



Doesn’t that sum it up well?



A confident self assured person can suddenly feel powerless
and vulnerable as soon as the panic manifests. As the bodily
sensations race, the mind jumps from logic and reason to wild
fears fueled by the imagination.



The hardest part for most people to get their heads around is why
they feel so suddenly powerless during a panic attack?



The automatic reaction for most to the sensations of a panic attack
are to fight against it. To shut it down and end it as soon as possible.

Coping techniques like deep breathing and distraction are mildly
effective at best. When these techniques fail to get results, that is
when the person really leaps over to ‘the enemy of their imagination’.



It goes something like this:



“I used all my coping techniques but I still feel very anxious,
in fact it may be getting worse!



“What if this keeps getting worse and no help can get to me here?”



Where people run with this type of thinking their imagination will
continue to escalate the fear, leaving them feeling more and more
vulnerable and out of control.



The secret to regain control and come back to yourself, is to learn
how to respond to the panic in an appropriate manner.



The solution is to work with the bodily sensations
rather than against them.



Let me give you a small example. If you were sitting
on a train and started to feel sensations that indicated
the beginning of a panic attack, instead of trying to stop
the experience do the opposite. Acknowledge that
you are safe, label the sensations and then tell the sensations that
scare you, to get worse. If you are sweating tell your body to
sweat more, if your heart is racing, tell it to race faster.



Move into the experience rather than against it.





The real panic only begins as soon as you hand over reason
and control to your imagination. By moving into the experience
voluntarily, you become the decision maker and therefore
retain control. If you're going to have a panic attack
it is going to happen on your terms.





You empower yourself because you are directing the whole
experience not handing “over to the enemy of our imagination.”
by Joe Barry
PanicAway.com