Unfortunately, anxiety and panic attacks affect several million people. It affects people from all walks of life, irrespective of their age. sex or mental health difficulties. Unfortunately, when compared with men, twice the number of women seems to suffer from these attacks.
Most anxiety and panic attacks have some sort of trigger that sets them off. Therefore, it is important for you to uncover the triggers that are likely to create anxiety situations. Among the most common triggers are stress, personal problems, and work pressures. People who are exposed to extreme and sustained stress are also likely to exhibit so form of anxiety as well at some stage or the other. Hence one of the ways of managing anxiety and panic attacks is to be aware of the triggers that lead into more sustained anxiety experiencing which in turn can become embedded over time.
Hence, ways to overt these occurences are:
* Avoid known trigger situations. This is only a temporary strategy to avoid a problem from escalating because in the long-term you can’t avoid people, lifts public speaking, etc. forever.
- Learn and use meditation, controlled breathing or relaxation techniques to de-stress a situation and lessen the impact of a known trigger.
- Sometimes, simple stress management techniques, such as, relaxing baths, massage and exercise helps take the edge off an arising anxiety or panic level, just enough for you to ride it out.
Finally, if your anxiety and panic is of a more serious nature and impacting significantly on your life then engaging a practitioner who is skilled with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is an effective way for achieving significant and substantial results. Often this, whist expensive can be money well spent. This is usually done with the help of a specialist psychotherapist, life coach or counsellor, and some psychiatrist or medical practitioner. Remember, the latter are also likely to supplement their interventions pharmacological methods as well. This combination approaches has had very good results and is well supported in the literature.
The medical approach alone is effective for acute treatment and in skilled hands can give you just the short-term relief you need to get control of the triggers and whilst you developed better life-skills to not be so overcome by the physiological symptoms that arise in response to the anxiety and panic trigger situations.
The worst thing about anxiety symptoms is that they are triggered off often before you can get them under control leaving more anxious about going into public situations and may lead to social phobia forcing to avoid public events and places.
For this reason, it is imperative to take immediate action to treat an anxiety and/or panic attack in order to prevent these other secondary problems from arising, these three tips give you some sequence of methods that you can use to address your anxiety levels, but also give you a clue as to when you should no longer attempt to go it alone and when to seek medical and CBT support.
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