How Can I Overcome Anxiety Attacks?
How can I overcome serious anxiety attacks?
Anxiety Question:
How do you overcome anxiety attacks without medication?
Anxiety Answer:
There are several different theories on how one can overcome anxiety attacks. The best (and by best I mean most effective shown by research) is through some cognitive-behavioral therapy. First you have to identify your triggers (not only what causes your anxiety attacks, but also the ONE main cause for why you are having the anxiety attacks in the first place).
Next you need to record what thoughts run through your mind while you are having the anxiety attack (for example, some people fear they will faint or go crazy, etc.) Then you need to replace your negative (most of the time also irrational thoughts) with positive (rational) thoughts.
For example, if you think you are going to go crazy during an anxiety attack, you can replace that thought with "I have had these kinds of attacks probably 100s of times and I have never gone crazy before” or "never fainted before" or whatever the case may be.
The next step would be exposure therapy (the behavioral component). To do this you will have to expose yourself to both the uncomfortable feelings and sensations that an anxiety attack brings on as well as the situations and triggers that bring it on - so if you experience rapid heart rate during an anxiety attack you might expose yourself by running up and down a flight of stairs a few times - then you bring back in the cognitive component and tell yourself something like "my heart is pounding because I just ran up and down stairs and nothing bad is going to happen to me. This is a normal reaction and the same reaction I get when I have an anxiety attack; so if nothing happens to me now, nothing will happen when my heart beats fast during an attack either."
Then you want to expose yourself to situations or triggers - make a list of 20 or so things that you know give you anxiety attacks and label them on a scale from 0-8 (0 is no anxiety, 8 is the most horrible anxiety attacks). Start out by doing things in the 1-2 area and gradually go up your list all the while using the cognitive component too.
More about overcoming anxiety:
- How do I overcome anxiety disorder?
- How do you overcome anxiety attacks?
- Overcoming Generalized Anxiety Disorder without anti anxiety medication.
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