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Anxiety and Panic Attacks: The Truth will Set You Free

Unlike so many people on the Internet, I don’t claim to have discovered THE CURE for panic attacks and other anxiety states. I do offer you a beautifully simple insight into panic which will change your reaction to it, and let you immediately start on the path to calm. That insight?

“Accept your panic symptoms and ….they’ll go. Fight them,
and they’ll intensify.”

Look at that word ‘intensify’. It’s about tensing up. Becoming worried and even more panicky about….what? Your feelings of panic. Once you really realise, once the ‘ah ha’ moment happens for you, you’ll see that they’re only feelings. They can’t harm you.

It seems almost cruel to tell you but if you’ve been experiencing anxiety and panic for a while, I have to let you know that you are the main reason that your fears stay with you.

It is your fear of the fear-filled symptoms that keep your fear going.

You’re the major part of your problem. But you are also the total solution.

Just so you’re very clear: tensing up and fighting your symptoms of panic (your racing pulse, your dry throat, and your queasy tummy) did not help you in the past. Tensing up will NOT HELP YOU today. It will not help you in the future.

There is a book on the Internet which is based entirely on that one insight, that truth. The author that that revelation is his discovery and for $47US you can buy it to send panic away. That truth about panic will set you free, and you can most certainly use it to send panic away. The other part of that truth is that it’s not new. Over thirty years ago, an Australian General Practitioner (GP) Claire Weekes, was one of many people who gave that insightful advice to hundreds of thousands of people through her books, and the self-help groups she established.

She advised people who experienced episodes of panic to do the opposite of what they had been doing. Instead, they should float into their panic, and welcome it like an old friend.

Dr Weekes knew that if you experience those terrifying fear-filled symptoms you know that there’s nothing to fear, at a rational level. At an emotional level, you still feel overwhelmed. For many, the fact that they can’t explain why they feel so terrified is often the most upsetting.

Fear of fear itself
Once you accept that there is no real danger, you’ll see that your real fear IS THE FEAR OF THE PANICKY FEELINGS THEMSELVES. If you let those inappropriate messages of fear come and do their worst, you’d learn how to send those fears packing.

So to summarise, offer no resistance. Accept. Flow. When your pulse races, your heart pounds, do the opposite of what you normally do. Do this:
STOP.

Mimic Mother Nature – flow with the hurricane
Just as the grass and the trees sway with the wind, rather than rigidly resist it, let your fear feelings come. Then, just observe what happens without offering any resistance.

You might want to practise this at home alone a few times and you’ll see how well it works. I know you can make yourself feel great fear. Bring those memories back. Feel those symptoms and now…. just accept them.

That’s right. I’m not saying TRY to do anything. I’m not saying TRY to relax. I’m not saying try to divert yourself from your fear-filled thoughts.

I am saying – do absolutely nothing. Accept your feelings. Just to be clear about this, Dr Weekes was not saying and I am not saying: “here is THE CURE for panic attack symptoms.” We can leave silly claims like that to people who call their approach a “The Method”. The simple truth is that the way to escape fear is to float with it.

Use of diversion
A quick note to those of you who use diversionary tactics to …well, to divert you from the intense feelings of fear. By all means keep doing that if you think it helps. My advice? It may help in the short term but it’s just a diversion. All those tactics act in an insidious way to keep the panic with you. They can even become as much an habituated response as the panic itself.

When you recognise your role in your own panic episodes, you’re 90% closer to the solution, to a life in which being in the grip of panic will be part of your past. Next time you feel the first fluttering of fear and panic think to yourself:

“I know you. You’re nothing to panic about. Come on and do your worst. I know you can’t harm me.”

It’s all in the mind
As I point out in my self-help kit Calming Words, if you feel terrified standing in that queue at the supermarket, or sitting in the middle of the row at the cinema, the feelings you feel are fine.

Those feelings are a perfect reaction to…danger.

But there’s no real danger in the Supermarket – apart from the ever-increasing cost of goods. Your mind sent the wrong message “danger, danger” to your body. Your body has then had the right reaction to that danger message.

To end with the good news: those messages can be rewritten, re-learned. How to re-write those messages is just one of the many approaches I cover in my self-help kit Calming Words.

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Dr Jeannette Kavanagh is a consultant and solution-oriented counselor specializing in establishing mentoring and coaching programs in businesses, and Universities. As a counselor she works mainly with people who have anxiety issues, particularly in relation to performing in public. Visit www.calmingwords.com for FR+EE e-zine Oasis of Calm. For your Free 7-part public speaking success course and another gift, please visit www.conquerpublicspeakingfears.com/e-zine.php

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