If you experience panic attacks, you are not alone. Nearly 13% of all people experience a panic attack at least one time in their lifetime. As hard as panic attacks may be to predict, there are ways to prevent them from happening. No one wants to fear controlling their life. Therefore, we must commit to a process of reacting automatically when we sense a panic attack beginning. It is our response to our challenges that defines us. So, here is a game plan on how to prevent a panic attack or anxiety attack!
1. Learn To Read The Signs And The Symptoms of Panic Attacks
If you expect to be able to do something about the panic attack, the first step is to recognize that you are in the middle of it or that one is just around the corner. The most important thing is to keep time on your side. If your research has brought you this far, you already know that panic attacks do not have to take place in the middle of an intense situation. This means you need to be ready at all times, striving to keep a mindful balance. This helps prepare you for that intense upsurge of negative emotions that are quickly accompanied by physical symptoms. By the time your body responds with a pounding heartbeat, intense sweating, breathlessness or nausea, your conscious mind has to have taken notice. Simple stats should tell you that this panic attwillk is o to last between 5 and 20 minutes. As soon as you are able to recognize when you are in the middle of one, you can begin to take follow-up action.
2. Maintain Your State Of Mindfulness To Avoid Panic Attacks
Drawing from the discussion above, you want to maintain a position of equivalence, where cane to withstand emotional pulls pushes more easily. Perhaps the best way of maintaining this mindfulness is to communicate with yourself. When you can sense a panic attack just around the corner, you should find yourself in a struggle to win your own attention!
You are trying to channel your conscious attention into remembering that you are merely experiencing anxiety, which is simply a reaction and not something that is actually dangerous. There are no tigers running to catch up with you, there is nothing hiding in the bushes, there is nothing under your bed. It is all in your mind somewhere, but you don’t have to care. You should tell yourself that this too shall pass, and even if you are, you're not as afraid as you used to be. In the end, you are going to emerge victorious.
3. Practice Mindfulness To Avoid Panic Attacks
The implication here is that you don’t want to live your life in fear. Instead, how to deal with anxiety attacks is simply learning how you can just get on with it. Of course, you don’t want to experience more panic attacks; but this does not mean that you need to start avoiding places, people, settings that saw you getting panicked in the past. In fact, if you do this you are letting fear take control over you. Likewise, reactivity would be to rank and grade places and situations. Mindfulness and ambivalence would be to simply carry on instead. The more you carry on and disengage with false flags that are everywhere in a panic attack, the more you keep the control within yourself and the more you’re able to keep your conscious attention within your own narrative.
4. Go With The Flow To Avoid Panic Attacks
Learn to go with the flow. Do not make an attempt at distracting yourself from your natural thought process. This means the first step would be acknowledging the panic attack when it shows up. You do not want to focus your mind elsewhere. In other words, you do not have to make an attempt to fight with your symptoms. Instead, you have to put conscious energy into the scene and into the process. You have to tell yourself that this too shall pass, and you have got the hang of this.
The more you try to distract your mind away from the ground reality, the harder and faster it will come back to the scene, but with lesser and lesser preparation. That is because you have only been trying to distract yourself, rather than acclimatize yourself to the reality of a panic attack. That will only have negative repercussions.
5. Breathe
Breathing is mindfulness and vice versa. The entire science of ancient yoga is based upon the power of breath. Your mind can be easily controlled if you focus on your breath. There’s no bigger clue to this than the intricate working of a panic attack itself: the first thing it does is disrupt your normal breathing and replaces it with quick, shallow breaths to get you to start to panic. This results in your conscious energy and focuses shifting to take care of these developments. You want to close your eyes. Then you want to start counting alongside inhalation and then alongside exhalation. You also want to engage your hands in the entire process, placing them at your solar plexus, the area between your sternum and your belly button. Your hand will begin to give you important feedback on your breathing process. It will tell you with its rhythmic rise and fall how well you are doing with breathing. Even if initially it takes you over 10 minutes to bring yourself back to normalcy, you’re building a virtual muscle that will make it easier the next time around.
6. Keep Your Mind In The Present Moment To Avoid Panic Attacks
Depending upon the situation, this may be easy or not so easy. For example, if you are in a new place, you could find a few interesting things around you. Then you could try to arrange them in alphabetical order or in the order of their utility to you. The process doesn’t matter. The goal is to find somewhere to apply your mind. Just about anything would be better than focusing upon the emerging fear.
7. Avoid Panic Attacks By Watching Out For Bad Inertia
We have all walked out of buffets feeling like Kings of the Hill. You have a small amount of positivity to work with when your hunger has been sated. Alongside hunger, anger, loneliness, and being tiresome are your other enemies. If you can keep these enemies at bay, you're already putting conscious energy into conserving your mood. You will find yourself more in action mode rather than in a reaction mode. Reactivity engenders itself, and your best bet is to stay away from this cyclical emotional activity. Sometimes these four adversaries are together called HALT.
8. Loneliness And Relaxation
Of course, you would be hard-pressed to follow through on more than a few of these pointers because you just would not have enough time. If you didn’t have much to look around, or if you were by yourself, you could always focus on your body by developing a body consciousness separate from your identity. Progressive relaxation refers to focusing upon your body, region by region, and consciously trying to relax.
9. Abandon Worry
Most people do not understand the difference between worrying and critical thinking. Going through various scenarios is most definitely not advisable. Evaluating each scenario once or twice and writing down the result of that evaluation should suffice in every condition. Otherwise, you’re letting yourself devolve into a pattern of parasitic thought that is going to consume your happiness and tax your consciousness.
10. Describe What’s Happening To You
This is a piece of advice that can be universally followed and applied. We can always start to characterize our situation, even as it deteriorates. If there is a journal nearby, we can begin to write down what we are experiencing. This will quickly bring you back to the present moment, breaking the mechanism of a panic attack.
11. Avoid Stimulants To Avoid Panic Attacks
You have to try and hold off on caffeine, alcohol, and most definitely smoking. We have all experienced nervousness and the dreadful anxiety that a mug of coffee nearly always brings. If your substance abuse keeps you up, it’s only going to make you doubly tired at a later time. All three of these habits are fully capable of triggering or enabling panic attacks. Once you get used to them, your frequent panic attacks end up in a panic disorder.
12. Exercise
We’ve all read how physical activity lowers stress levels, which researchers suspect is a leading cause of panic attacks. Just imagine yourself situated as a king in the middle of a heavy physical regimen, performed two times a day. If you just focus upon this imagery, you will quickly visualize how physical activity situates you firmly in good emotions.
If you experience panic attacks these habits can help in preventing them. However, it can help to work together with a licensed counselor to get to the root of your panic attacks to develop healthy ways of coping with them. This free test can help you understand whether you have a panic disorder and give you valuable information to discuss with your doctor. Take the first steps at overcoming your panic attacks today.
