If you’re a suffer like I am (was, actually), you already know the absolute terror panic attacks bring: The racing heartbeat, the migraine-like headaches, the feeling of extreme fear or paranoia, the difficulty breathing. I had been there to the point where it affected my personal relationships and job.
After trying a number of things, I finally found the right combination of natural and easily-implementable techniques that permanently put a stop to panic attacks in just a matter of days. Follow me as I tell you more.
Start Here: What Doesn’t Work
Just to be completely frank about this, but traditional drug therapy simply doesn’t work, unless your goal is to be a zoned-out zombie. If there was an anti-depressants and anti-anxiety med made, my doctor put me on it, to no real help. Sure, I made have had less attacks, but my life had become a numb representation of itself.
The reason why this doesn’t work is because, very simply, panic attacks are your physical response (it’s safe to say, your inappropriate response) to your thoughts. Drugs do nothing more than take away the symptoms of how you’re reacting, not the chain of how your thoughts form and what your body does to react to them.
Next Step: What Does Work
Panic attacks can either come from a build-up of stress and anxiety throughout the day or be triggered by a single event or phobia (like an extreme fear of spiders or being in public places).
Let’s talk about managing your daily stress and anxiety levels:
Diet: What we ingest can do a lot to alter our moods and ultimately, stress. That’s why I started to limit things that stimulated my nervous system: Nicotine, caffeine, sugar and any of the stuff in the energy drinks, like taurine, ephedra or guarana. Dehydration is more common than you think and it can make you feel sluggish and give you a headache, so I began to drink more water, too. Lastly, I started to eat more balanced meals with less processed food items. More and more research is coming out implicating food processing (and the chemicals used to preserve freshness and taste) to our mental health.
Exercise: Ok, I’m not about to tell you to train to become a tri-athlete or enter a strongman content, but I am saying that after I implemented a moderate exercise program, my panic recovery program took off. My mind got to take a break from anxious thoughts piling up and I released a lot of pent up stress… all from a very simple, easy to perform set of exercises!
Relaxation Breaks: Another big helper in my panic attack remedy was the use of relaxation and stretching techniques I used throughout the day (and even when experiencing an attack), which helped me to alleviate the build-up of stress and anxiety. No, I didn’t put on my yoga pants and meditate in my lotus position or anything, as a matter of fact, I did many of them at my desk at work or at stop lights in traffic – simple and totally free from embarrassment.
Herbs: Remember how I warned you against a pharmacological viewpoint to managing your panic attacks? Well, don’t think that I’m replacing drugs with herbs, I’m not. Actually, I found a number of herb and more importantly, herb combinations, are really helpful at creating mental “balance” and a sense of well-being. Passion flower, valerian, St. John’s wort, lemon balm and black cohosh, when used in the right combinations are wonderful “nerve tonics” that help to even out the highs and lows of daily stress.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy: With the previous approaches I’ve discussed, they are all useful for managing “typical” stress and keeping anxiety from building. But, we still need a way to handle situation-induced panic attacks (like I did with my agoraphobia – the fear of public places) or more importantly, techniques to stop panic attacks as they are occurring.
Cognitive behavior therapy (or CBT) is really nothing more than a set of relaxation exercises and diversion techniques to control your reaction to your thoughts. Additionally, there is a whole prescriptive process to gradually exposing yourself to those kinds of situations which make you nervous and anxious – giving you the tools to quickly and decisively deal with difficult phobias. After I started using CBT for my main three phobias, I was able to fully deal with them in just a couple of weeks. Free at last!