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Looking for help for your panic attacks? Here are 5 good tips to help you overcome them. If you’ve already suffered an attack, and been diagnosed, then you’ll know that the symptoms are terrifying. For sure you’ll want to prevent another. Now, no doubt, you’ll have been prescribed medication by your doctor, which can work well enough for many folks. But there are natural ways to overcome panic attacks that more and more sufferers are using. You’ll discover 5 of those here.

Reduce Stress in Your Life

Stressful events happening on top of high levels of general anxiety can trigger panic attacks. Learn to recognise the factors, situations and events that are causing you stress. Pinpoint those that are unnecessary or unimportant, and then avoid or eliminate them. You need to ask yourself what’s important in your life and what isn’t. If some things or people aren’t important then why worry about them?

Keep a Positive Frame of Mind

During a panic attack, it’s beneficial if you stay positive. You can do this if you know what the symptoms are and that they won’t cause you any harm (see below). By focussing on this positivity, you’ll be able to handle an attack better, so that it’s length and intensity is reduced.

Recognise the Symptoms of a Panic Attack

Even although you perhaps have already had an attack, get to know the various symptoms, and try to recall them during an attack, so that you can have a more positive outlook (see above). The typical symptoms are; shortness of breath, hyperventilation, racing heart, palpitations, tightness in chest and / or throat, shaking, tingling fingers, dizziness, wooziness, feeling of being detached from reality, feeling of impending doom, feeling that you may be having a heart attack.

Use Controlled Breathing Techniques

During a panic attack, try to get your breathing rhythm back to normality. But not too deep breathing, as this can have the opposite effect, just gentle, slow, controlled breathing. And, very important, breathe using the diaphragm so that all your lung capacity is being utilised, not just their tops as happens when you only breath using your chest. During an attack focus on your breathing.

Understand What Causes Panic Attacks

By understanding how panic attacks are caused you’ll know that they cannot harm you. The underlying cause of attacks is a pre-existing higher-than-normal level of anxiety that persists over a long period of time. A panic attack is triggered when a stressful event or situation is encountered, that pushes an already high level of anxiety to a point where your body reacts in a ‘flight or fight’ mode. This primeval response is used to protect humans (and animals) in dangerous situations, by either priming them to fight the danger or escape it.

But, of course, there isn’t any danger, just an irrational fear arising from elevated anxiety and some stress ‘trigger’. Your body can’t differentiate between the two and reacts as it has been programmed to do. So you can see that the symptoms of panic attacks are just your body’s reaction to a perceived threat that doesn’t in fact exist. In other words, a panic attack can’t cause you any harm.

And while we’re on the subject of ‘fear’, one of the critical factors in panic attacks is the actual ‘fear’ of having another one. Because the symptoms are so frightening, the fear of a repeat is so great that it is imprinted on your psyche. This adds to the already heightened general anxiety, so that when a simple stressful event occurs, an attack is triggered. This ‘cycle of anxiety’ (anxiety > fear > panic attack > anxiety > fear > panic attack > etc.) must be broken in order to stop further panic attacks, and, cure your general anxiety.

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