It Is Easier Dealing With Anxiety Attack If Your Goal Is Merely To Manage It

Anxiety is a very natural phenomenon.  Every body has his own way of dealing with anxiety. Some think that knowledge is the best antidote of anxiety. If you take the trouble to learn more about the things that you are anxious, it will disappear. However, it happens at times that our anxiety reaches such an irrational level that this particular antidote does not work. It really becomes harder to get rid of it because in most cases the reasons that make us anxious do not really exist.

However, you can eliminate even such irrational anxiety, if you really want to by looking inside at yourself rather out side for the source of anxiety. This is what therapies and meditations are all about. If you take cognitive therapy, the therapist will make you look inside your mind and will teach you to identify the thought process that gives rise to anxiety or panic. He will then show you how to divert that thought process into a safer channel, so that you can get rid of the anxiety.

Meditation is all about that too. While you meditate, you just try to take off your mind from your anxiety and concentrate it on something more pleasant. You then try to hold the mind there. In short, both therapy and meditation teach you to ignore the disturbing thought. They had initially become stronger because you have been literally walloping in your anxiety. Now that you are trying to neglect them, they will become weaker and soon will disappear.

However, dealing with anxiety becomes more difficult when, due to chemical imbalance in the brain, the normal anxiety becomes anxiety disorder, to be more accurate, generalized anxiety disorder or GAD. GAD will also show some physical symptoms like:

1.    Muscle tension, body aches and cramps

2.    Fatigue

3.    Dizziness

4.    Pounding heart

5.    Suffocation and chest pains

6.    Nausea and other stomach problem

7.    Chills and hot flashes

8.    Sweating, especially clammy hands

Such a person will not be able to control his anxious thought. He will become too numb to react in any rational manner. If that happens, do not hesitate to ask for help. Fortunately, GAD is curable.

Another disorder quite similar to GAD is panic disorder. In fact, both of them fall under the larger umbrella of anxiety attack and when people talk of anxiety attack, they often mean panic disorder, not GAD.

Though panic attacks are more severe than GAD, both of them have more or less the same symptoms. One of the major differences is that while a patient of GAD is worried about something in his life, the patient of panic attack fear for his life itself. He thinks he is dying or losing control and becoming mad. You can cure panic attack the same way you would cure GAD. Both of them need the same therapy and the same medicines. In both cases, it is wiser to see a psychiatrist with acronym MD or DO for proper diagnosis and treatment.

As panic attacks are nothing more than bodily sensation of anxiety and a catastrophic misrepresentation of those sensations, cognitive behavioral therapy is very beneficial as a medium of treatment. This therapy is a combination of cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy and controls the thought process as well as the behavior. Another beneficial therapy, which makes panic disorder patients become aware of the unconscious conflicts and fantasies, is the panic-focused psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Among the medicines, antidepressants have definite qualities that help to cure panic attack as well as GAD. However, the doses differ. As a rule, a victim of panic attack should be started on a very low dose of antidepressant while the GAD patients can be given the normal dose. These are long-term drug and do not show results before months. Benzodiazepines, on the other hand, act faster and show results in weeks. However, these drugs are habit-forming and should not be used for long. That is for the doctors to decide though.

Meanwhile you can practice some self-help techniques that will help you to control, if not cure panic disorder or GAD:

1.    First and foremost accept that you have panic disorder/GAD

2.    Develop the will to be cured.

3.    Breathe slowly through the nose using the diaphragm. Breathe in and out counting 5 or even 10.

4.    Consciously try to stay in the present. Rather than asking yourself what if, try to concentrate on how to cope with the attack.

5.    Learn to float with the symptoms rather than fight with them.

6.    It is easier dealing with anxiety attack, if your goal is not to eliminate it altogether, but to manage it.

7.    Some exercises like running on the spot for 1-minute help check panic attack.