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Treating Panic Attacks The Natural Way
01/02/2012 18:23
Do you often experience panic attacks? Suffering from panic attacks can be depressing and debilitating. It disrupts your sense of control and concentration. It makes you feel preoccupied with something you are afraid of. Panic attacks can be scary for patients as well those who gets to witness the episodes. There are many ways in treating panic attacks.
According to several studies conducted, the best way to treat any disorder is to treat it naturally. Natural treatment for anxiety gets rid of the side effects that you may experience when taking in medications. Although the effects of this approach may not be immediate, carefully following it may provide promising results. Make sure that you are emotionally, mentally and physically prepared for this before you start the treatment. Here are just a few tips for you to take note of.
Natural Treatments for Panic and Anxiety
- Improve your lifestyle
Sometimes, one thing that causes us to experience certain diseases or disorders is because of the bad lifestyle that we have mired ourselves into. It is best to avoid vices, most especially smoking and drinking. Minimize intake of sweets, fatty foods, junk foods and other stimulants like coffee. This will make you healthier and feel more relaxed. Aside from these, make sure that you get enough rest and sleep. Sleep is a very important part of our daily activities. Getting enough sleep helps us function well and properly and stops anxiety.
- Drink plenty of water
Drinking enough water has a lot of wonderful benefits. It is proven to relieve anxiety especially when you drink six to eight glasses of water per day. Water is an effective treatment to almost all health conditions and helps the body detox. Even a slight amount of dehydration alters your moods and increases the risk of panic.
- Perform calming techniques
The best immediate treatment to stop panic attacks is deep breathing. Performing deep breathing exercises will help relieve anxiety and will help in calm the nerves. Doing yoga and other exercises can also help improve your condition. You may also want to take a cup of herbal lemon tea to soothe your senses. According to studies, tea has a tranquilizing effect on the nervous system, so it will help you calm down.
- Think positive
A positive mind comes with a positive attitude. Believe that you can control the situation, you can do well, and everything will just follow. Always put to mind that every problem has a solution, so stop worrying and start acting. It is a useful way to counterbalance the negative and catastrophic thinking that keeps you under the thumb of anxiety disorder.
- Get a good massage or listen to music
Massages are good ways to calm oneself. It helps relax the mind and the body, thus reduces panic attacks. Others find listening to music a relaxing activity. You may also want to listen to music and imagine yourself in a calm and relaxing place while listening to calm or relaxing sounds.
Treating panic attacks does not only entail taking prescribed medications or therapies. It may also mean changing your lifestyle and doing things to avoid the stimulus that causes your anxiety.
Catastrophic Thinking and Panic Attacks: The Relation
25/01/2012 18:10
Are you tired of experiencing panic attacks over and over again? Panic attacks are sudden intense feelings of severe anxiety and nervousness that happen quite often without warning as you are not aware of the triggers. During panic attacks, a person sometimes loses self-control and finds it difficult to concentrate even when doing very simple activites. Often, you can get confused with catastrophic thinking and panic attacks. These two concepts are often associated with panic disorder but some clarification is required.
Catastrophic thinking happens before a person goes into a panic attack. He or she thinks the worst things might happen. Thus, the person thinks negatively. In order to avoid this kind of thinking, a person should find the main cause of fear or the main cause of anxiety in order to prevent this from occurring.
When faced with a fearful situation, the body responds by manifesting a fight or flight response. This response causes the system to increase pulse rate and respiratory rate, tremors, hot flashes, chills and upset stomach. To prevent any untoward circumstances to occur, it is best to find ways to control the situation and find ways to calm yourself down.
Listed below are some approaches to manage panic attacks. Read on them and apply these approaches in managing your condition.
- Face your fear. Give yourself the freedom to explore your emotions most especially your anxiety. Suppressing what you feel will just worsen the situation. Conquer your fears!
- Do some deep breathing exercises. At the first sign of panic, try to control the situation by doing some breathing exercises. Deep breathing will help relax the nerves.
- Think positive. Telling yourself that you can do it and that you can calm yourself will help you relax and avoid panicking. Sometimes it is all about mind over matter.
- Determine the cause of your fear. Determining the cause of everything will help you face the problem easily. It will avoid catastrophic thinking and panic attacks. Once you get to know what you fear, you will know how to manage it and avoid it or minimize the effects that it could cause you.
- Try to walk slowly. Walking fast may cause you to panic and experience panic attacks. Continuously tell yourself to calm down and relax and that everything is fine. So, there is no need to panic.
- Communicate slowly. Talking fast may also lead to panic attacks and it will be difficult for you to breathe deeply. Do not rush. Express yourself slowly.
Once you have managed to face a panic attack episode, you will feel better and more relaxed. List down the things that helped you feel relaxed so that you when you feel that you are about to have an episode, somehow you will know how to manage.
Neurofeedback for People with Anxiety Disorders with Panic Disorder
20/01/2012 11:42
For many people, anxiety disorders with panic disorder is so severe that it often comes with physical symptoms that are like heart failure, and this causes the victim to have an impending feeling of doom, as if he or she is going to die. Obviously, many victims of this diorder want to live and function normally but it can be quite discouraging and difficult. With neurofeedback, however, individuals can identify all the causes of these attacks and therefore, panic and anxiety attacks may be prevented from happening.
During a panic and anxiety attack, no matter how major or mild it is, it can involve a feeling of intense fear. The main issue with them is they can occur without any warning, which is what makes them hard to manange. Although the attacks may last for only ten minutes, whenever you are in the center of one, it will appear as if it lasted for a lifetime. The primary thing that which makes an anxiety very serious is the fact that when an individual has gone through an attack, there is this underlying fear of having some more attacks in the future. Put simply, the moment that a person has had his or her first initial attack, it is already frightening in itself. However, one should be aware of what really happens during an attack so that extreme caution may be given and further damage would be prevented.
This is the reason why in anxiety disorders, the fear is two-fold, which makes coping with the disorder harder and more challenging. Although the symptoms may vary from person to person, the intensities can also differ, but the common symptoms associated with panic and anxiety disorders include hyperventilation and fast breathing, numbness ans weakness on the fingers arms, toes, and leg muscle tension, sweating, dizziness, nausea, changes in vision, and chest pain. Aside from all these physical symptoms, there are also some mental symtoms. A person may feel that, while having a panic attack, he or she might be losing his or her mind, having some trouble in social settings, having a feeling of detachment from the actual self, and having disotorted perception.
Out of all these, neroufeedback has been proven to work for a lot of people who have anxiety disorders with panic disorder, as it relieves them from that feeling of intense fear and impending doom that this disorder is associated with. Regarding the individual and the problem, a lot of therapists may recommend neurofeedback alone or it can also be coupled with another form of therapy. The primary aim is to educate the victims about items that can induce an attack. This is the reason why nerofeedback is prefered by a lot of people. A few times, cognitive behavioral treatments may be recommended. With this, triggers and stressors that may cause the attack will be identified which will cause the person to stay away from them so that an attack may be prevented.