[WEB] Science Explains 10 Ways to Stop A Panic Attack Before It Happens

For those that suffer from panic attacks, they can be a terrible thing. Often, they are misunderstood, and those that suffer from panic attacks are often accused of just being dramatic. This is far from the case though, panic attacks are far from pleasant experiences and to those in the grips of one, they are a very real thing.

Panic attacks are a physical response as a result of a perceived threat, real or otherwise, that is characterized by such symptoms as sweating, shivering, shallow breathing, a racing heart, shaking, and just overall unpleasant feelings. Try to remember how you felt the last time you had a near miss while driving; hydroplaning on a wet road, or nearly colliding with another driver. That feeling you likely experienced, the rush of adrenaline, and the fear is what it feels like to be in the midst of a panic attack.

Some time or another, everyone is likely to experience a panic attack at some point in their lives. Whether it be due to an actual dangerous situation or threat, or just from an extremely stressful situation. If you find yourself getting panic attacks regularly for no real reason, and it ends up negatively affecting your life then you may, unfortunately, have a panic disorder.

To help you get through life uninhibited by panic attacks, continue reading for 10 ways to stop your panic attacks before they get out of control:

1. TRY SELF-MASSAGING THE SCALP

Who wouldn’t want a nice massage every time things got a bit stressful or you were feeling nervous? Research has found that a massage provides real benefits and can shift a person’s biochemistry. According to one study, cortisol levels were able to be significantly reduced while dopamine and serotonin were increased dramatically as a result of massage therapy!

If you find yourself in a situation where a panic attack might occur, consider self-massage in the form of a nice scalp massage. Scalp massages reduce the tension you feel in your neck and at the back of your head andprovidingd increased blood flow to the brain. With a little reading and some practice, giving yourself a scalp massage is easy!

2. TAKE DEEP BREATHS

Nearly every technique used to relieve stress and induce relaxation incorporates deep breathing in some fashion or another. It’s amazing how something as basic as slow controlled breathing could have such a calming effect on our whole nervous system!

Some stress relieving techniques that incorporate deep breathing include resistance breathing, breath moving, and coherent breathing, all of which work by stimulating our vagus nerve which provides relief due to the release of hormones and enzymes such as prolactin, acetylcholine, oxytocin, and vasopressin.

If you find yourself in the heat of the moment and think a panic attack may come on, don’t worry about stick to the above techniques to a T; just try to simply take slow, full, lung-filling breaths. Hold it in for a few seconds and then, just as slowly, exhale. You’ll likely notice relief pretty quickly!

3. GIVE IT A SHAKE

Shaking is a natural response of most animals after they’ve escaped from a dangerous situation, though seems to have been lost on us humans due to the decrease in environmental risks we face. The next time you’re feeling a bit nervous, try to shake about a little bit and you’ll likely find the tension start to easy and as a result, you’ll likely overcome panic attack!

4. LISTEN TO BINAURAL BEATS OR WAVES

Binaural beats are a type of technology that can have profound effects on your ability to control pain and also your mood. Utilizing low-frequency tones, binaural beats have been shown to significantly reduce anxiety in those prone to it and may even alleviate symptoms of children suffering from ADHD!

Consider downloading a few binaural beats, or even just some ocean sounds to your phone so if you find yourself in a situation conducive to a panic attack, you can try to relax and let the sounds calm your mind. Try to really focus on the sounds and imagine yourself in a nice safe place. You’ll likely feel much better after a few minutes of this.

5. CARRY EMERGENCY DARK CHOCOLATE

This technique is a lot more appealing for most, I’m sure, and will likely be hard to pass up once you find it works for you! By consuming dark chocolate with 85 percent or more cocoa content, you’ll enjoy an infusion of magnesium in your system. Magnesium has a profound calming effect and chocolate is one of the best sources of this miracle mineral.

Besides containing magnesium in significant amounts, dark chocolate also contains theobromine, which also helps better your mood, and tryptophan, which is an amino acid that is a precursor to the hormone serotonin.

Try carrying around a couple squares of dark chocolate with you and the next time you feel like a panic attack might come on, try eating a few. You’ll likely find the panic passes without an attack and you’ll also have the added benefit of a tasty treat!

6. TRY SPLASHING COLD WATER ON YOUR FACE

A splash of cold water to the face offers a jarring change of perspective! Studies have found that the parasympathetic system is stimulated by the cold-water immersion of one’s face. As a result, physiological changes occur that stimulate the vagus nerve, significantly reducing our heart rate, and also activating our immune and digestive systems. Splashing water on your face works extremely well at stimulating the vagus nerve due to the area behind our eyes being especially responsive.

7. DISTRACT YOURSELF

Panic attacks usually occur as a result of our own anxious thinking. If you can distract yourself from these anxiety-inducing thoughts, a panic attack can be avoided. Getting these anxious thoughts under control is a great way to overcome panic attack!

Reading a book, playing a game, organizing or cleaning up the house, having a phone call with a friend, or simply counting are all great ways of distracting yourself from anxious thoughts. Anything that you can do to take your mind off the anxious thoughts swimming around in your head will likely result in an end to stressful feelings and allow you to overcome panic attack. Distracting your mind from these thoughts is a skill that can be practised, so the better you become at it the better you’ll be at overcome panic attack.

If simple distracting thoughts aren’t doing it for you, try more sensory experiences such as the previously mentioned splash of cold water to the face, strong smells or tastes, or ice. Anything that you can use to distract yourself from the anxious thoughts and feelings that trigger your panic attacks is fine, though sensory experiences are most effective.

8. TRY YOGA: RABBIT POSE

If you happen to be a practitioner of yoga, give the Rabbit Pose a shot. If you’ve got a little time and are in a more private setting, the Rabbit Pose, where you sit on your heels, knees and feet together, and reach behind you to grab your heels, can provide relief from stress and anxiety. This pose is great for relieving tension in your back, neck, and shoulders where stress is often pent up. The Rabbit Pose is purported to be especially beneficial for suffers from anxiety and depression due to the resulting compression of the parathyroid and thyroid glands. This pose also promotes blood flow to the brain, all of which offer panic-mitigating effects!

9. TRY WARMING YOUR HANDS

When we start to feel stressed, our bodies start to feed blood to the more tense areas of our bodies such as our hips and shoulders due to the fight-or-flight response. As a result, our hands will typically become cold! By warming our hands, the stress response can be reversed and parasympathetic relaxation is triggered! There has been a lot of research on this that have found that blood pressure can be reduced significantly by warming our hands.

Physically warming our hands under hot water, in a warm bath, holding onto a nice hot cup of coffee or tea are all great ways to warm up our hands and experience relief but visualization techniques are also effective for this. By imagining yourself in a warm situation such as in bed, under warm blankets, or sitting in front of a nice cozy fire can all benefit us by triggering a relaxing response from our bodies!

10. TRY ICE PACKS

If you find yourself having panic attacks while home a lot, consider keeping a few ice packs at the ready in your freezer. If you feel like an attack might be coming on, place a couple against your lower back while holding a few more in your hands and you’ll likely notice relief from the stress and anxiety that is coming over you. By doing this you might notice immediate relief as the tightness and tension in your upper body moves down to where the cold sensations produced by the ice packs are centered. After a minute of this you can move on to some slow breathing and within a couple more minutes the panic and anxiety will likely to have passed!

CONCLUSION

Panic attacks are terrible experiences and a panic disorder is a debilitating condition to have to deal with! With a few stress and anxiety-relieving techniques in your belt, panic attacks do not have to rule your life! Keep these techniques in the back of your mind and the next time you feel panic start to set in, give them a go and you’ll likely feel the stress start to melt away!

Source

[WEB SITE] Anxiety Disorders and Panic Attacks

Alison Sommer graduated from Carleton with a degree in Asian Studies, and now works as an academic technologist at Macalester College. She believes that awareness is the first step to improving problems within mental health care, and will be speaking about anxiety disorders and panic attacks based on her own constantly evolving understanding of her anxiety disorder, OCD. Alison’s greatest loves are her family, hockey and Star Wars.

My first goal here today is not to have a panic attack right on stage.  I have an anxiety disorder called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD. Obsessive Compulsive…I have a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that causes me to become anxious or frightened when something wrong or unexpected happens. Like if somebody sits at my seat at the table.

It also causes intrusive thoughts. These are thoughts that come unbidden to my head about things that I’ve done in the past or things that I might do. Things that could happen by chance or because everybody secretly hates me.

As you might imagine, these intrusive thoughts are really quite anxiety producing. And this anxiety can manifest in different physical and emotional responses, one of which is the panic attack which I’ll be talking about more in depth later.

But, the thing that made me really hyper aware of the effects of my OCD and made me determined to spread awareness about anxiety disorders in general is that my own symptoms were not always this severe.

So, I want to start at the beginning. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been sort of an obsessive-minded child. I would take a thing, good or bad, and roll it over in my head…over and over.

I was also really shy and awkward and I know, especially at Carlton, a lot of you are thinking, “yeah, me too.” Because, you know, there are a lot of shy, awkward people and all of us have our little obsessions. I don’t know if there is a scale for being shy, awkward and obsessive, but I always felt like I was toward the high end of the range.

“Weirdo” and “freak” were terms I readily accepted as a teenager. And when all the other girls my age were really into the Backstreet Boys, I’m dating myself, I was obsessed with Star Wars. I sort of still am. Like, I got in trouble for coming home late for curfew once as teenager and as punishment my parents took away my Star Wars stuff. And I thought that the world had collapsed.

I also had on again/off again issues with anxiety and depression. And, you know, anxiety and depression really go hand-in-hand, like two best friends who like to corner a third person and make them feel like shit.

So, there I was, this anxious, awkward, obsessive and sometimes depressed girl and that was life. That was my normal.

When I got a little older and started coming out of my shell and meeting people with similar interests to me, like the folks here at the Sci-Fi House at Carlton. Benton House, anyone? Woo.

I started actually opening up and talking to people about my feelings. And I started to realize that there were other people like me that suffered from anxiety and depression. And suddenly I went from feeling, instead of like a freak, I felt like just kind of a normal, anxiety/depression story with a little obsessive behavior thrown in for good measure. And that actually felt pretty cool. So, that was my life.

I also started to get a little help then, I saw my first psychiatrist, got my first meds. And, you know, things were going pretty good. And then I got a really bad concussion while playing hockey. Love the sport, still play it, but it was bad.

That’s when things took a nosedive from me feeling like “normal/runs in the family crazy” to like “scary crazy.” That’s when the intrusive thoughts started getting louder and louder. And it was bad. It was really, really bad. I was angry  all the time. It mostly came out at my husband, but my road rage was also pretty epic.

While I was being an ass to other people, I was also being an ass to myself. I was not eating. I was down to a size zero and that monkey was saying, “you can get skinnier.” I didn’t want to accept that I had a problem. I wanted to feel like I was kicking ass. But, I knew deep down that there was something wrong, because I wasn’t sleeping and my marriage was going through the shitter. But, trying to even think about changing my habits, like, really thinking about changing any of my habits would give me massive anxiety. And this anxiety was leading to panic attacks. Panic attacks are one of the most frightening manifestations of anxiety.

I know if you’ve never had a panic attack, the name sounds kind of lame. We all have those moments of panic, like: “oh, did I leave the oven running” or “my kid just bolted out into the middle of the street.” Or maybe more for you: “I forgot to study for that test.” But, none of these are panic attacks.

The Mayo Clinic’s website says that “A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reactions when there is no real danger or apparent cause. Panic attacks can be very frightening. When a panic attacks occurs you might think you’re losing control, having a heart attack, or even dying.” That’s a pretty good definition, but what does it really feel like? That’s what I’m going to try to show you.

So, it’s a pretty normal day, but maybe a little bit stressful, like at a performance evaluation for work or packing for vacation. I’m doing something pretty normal and I start to feel “off.” I know something’s not quite right. I’m getting tingly. A tingling numbness creeps up my neck and all over my face, and seeps into my head. I feel dizzy. So, I sit down. Sometimes I think maybe I just didn’t eat enough today, so I grab for some crackers or a candy bar or whatever I have. My head is feeling fuzzy. As I’m sitting there, sometimes I think “oh my gosh, it’s a seizure or heart attack or…” But, I know better. I know it’s a mounting panic attack when my heart starts beating harder, not faster really, just hard. Like the heartbeat in the background of a horror film.

Now I’m getting scared thinking, “no, no, not here. Not now.” Right now, the right medication might help, might bring this crescendo back down and end the panic attack, but sometimes even the right medication doesn’t always help.

I feel off and I want to sit still, but my body just won’t listen, so I pace. I lash out. The tears come now. Broken, dry cries. Weak, angry shrieks break through and my brain is screaming,

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Not a real cry, nothing that could be cathartic can come out. It all gets caught in my throat and in my head. Oh…I get angry. Mad at this feeling, myself, everything! I pound my head with my fists. I want to bang it against the floor. I want to smash my skull and make it all end!

Sometimes I do, I just hit myself and I can’t hold back and it feels like relief suddenly. That physical pain, and I crave physical pain: cuts, burns, bruises. And then that scares me even more.

I look up at my shelf of pill bottles and I think, “I could take them all. I could end it right now.” But, I don’t. I don’t. Real tears come now. So sad. Tears. But, now I can lay down. Just wait for it to be over. Eventually, it ends. It always does end.

And I’m still here. And with my sanity coming back, with my head clearing, I’m grateful to still be here and that it always stops eventually.

This is not an easy thing to live with, knowing that it could happen at any moment, any place, at home, at work, at the tattoo parlor…that’s happened.

And not a lot of people talk about it even though a lot of people go through it. When I first posted to my blog about my experiences with panic attacks, I was surprised when people started contacting me from all corners of my life…on the internet, to tell me about their experiences. And to thank me for speaking out and told me I was brave.

It got me thinking. These days everything seems to have an awareness month or a ribbon or some picture you can share on Facebook to spread awareness.

I’ve made this sort of my panic attack awareness effort and now I hope you all know a little bit more about they really feel like.

As for me, my husband did finally get me to see a doctor. It turns out that my anxiety and obsessive tendencies had basically been give steroids by the concussion.

And I was diagnosed with severe OCD and we started the dance of trying to find the right combination of meds and therapy. We’re still figuring it out.

I still have panic attacks, but luckily, thanks to some wonderful people and some magical chemicals, they are fewer and further in between. And blogging about it and talking about it is part of my therapy too.

I’m very blessed to have such a wonderful support structure here in my life. And to have been given these opportunities to talk openly about my anxiety disorder.

40 million adult Americans, according to the National Institute for Mental Health, have anxiety disorders. That’s just over 18% of the population, so chances are you know someone with an anxiety disorder, whether it’s a friend, a colleague, or even yourself. Of the 40 million who have anxiety, 15% of them experience the terror of panic attacks and it’s twice as common in women as in men. 

When I’m having a panic attack, the best thing people can do for me is to just be with me and let me know they’re there for me and will do things I ask that I say I need, whether that’s to open a window, or let me run away from the room, or turn out the lights… none of which you can do on an airplane, by the way, it turns out.

So, if you’re there when someone you know is having a panic attack, it’s hard to breath in the middle of an attack, much less speak, so instead of asking them over and over,

“Are you ok? What’s wrong? Are you ok? What are you panicking about? What can I do? Are you ok? Are you ok?”

Just be there. Let them know you support them and sit with them as they ride out those waves of panic because… you can’t tell a panicking person to calm down. That’s like trying to tell someone with a gaping wound to just stop bleeding.

But, what you can do is let them know you’re there for them. It may make you feel helpless, but your presence is more comforting than you may realize. And then when it’s over, then you can ask what you can do for next time, if anything really.

But, one thing we can all do, is work together to end the stigma surrounding mental health disorders like anxiety, so that everybody who needs help can feel safe in asking for it.

You can help by showing respect to people who seek the aid of therapists, psychiatrists and medications. Instead of telling someone to work harder or worry less, tell them that you’re there for them and that you understand these things can be a struggle.

If you have anxiety, it’s not your fault.

Help is available in many forms. I started getting help by working with my primary care physician, but there are also hotlines and websites such as The Anxiety and Depression Association of America at http://www.adaa.org.

In short, if you or someone you know has an anxiety disorder, give help, get help, speak out.

You’re not alone.

Source: Anxiety Disorders and Panic Attacks – Artificial Intelligence and Magnificent Brain