By Dr. Stephen Antony, MD (Psychiatry)
Managing panic attacks can be a real challenge, for starters you need to get a thorough medical examination to rule out any possible medical causes for panic attacks.
There are many causes for panic attacks, lets go through each of them and how you can handle each of these causes:
1) Stress factors: Stress can be caused by many different sources. It can be caused by a bad financial situation, lack of emotional support, loss of job, frequent arguments at home or work place and other factors that make us feel insecure.
What you can do: Identify the source of your stress, make a list of all the factors contributing to your stress and resolve to either get help and deal with them or eliminate the stress factors.
2) Body dysfunction: Essentially what happens in panic attack is that the body sets off false alarms and stimulates you to take evasive action by releasing chemicals into your blood stream.
What you can do: You need to do what the opposite of what your body expects you to do i.e. instead of taking evasive action, you need to relax and send a message back to your body saying that there is nothing to panic about and the way to due it by learning and implementing active body relaxation techniques.
If you are suffering from Panic/Anxiety attacks, Agorophobia or OCD, Watch this video
Relaxation can be performed at any place. During relaxation the mind and body get a break from the stress of the day and relaxation doesn’t cost you any money, it only needs practice.
Here’s a simple breathing exercise that you can adopt for relaxation, relax by simply taking a few moments to breathe deeply. Take a couple of moments, and breathe deeply, feeling your abdomen expand, then exhale slowly, feeling as you do the effect on each muscle group in your body. Repeat and relax! Deep breathing relaxes muscles, releases stress-busting hormones, and gets extra oxygen into the brain.
3) Develop a relaxing activity: Any activity that allows you to breathe normally can be considered as a relaxing activity. Most of the jobs that demand work in a short period of time are stressful because they expect you to focus and hurry and this disrupts your body’s natural mechanism and releases stress hormones. Learning how to breathe efficiently and function can greatly reduce your stress and increase your productivity.
Baths and showers are a great way to relax. Soaking in warm water relieves the tightness in muscles, while a warm shower jet can focus on a particular area such as the back and provide relief. For an added relaxation effect you can add aroma salts to bath water, adding rejuvenating bath cream can make your skin feel fresh.
Find a relaxation activity that works for you and practice it regularly to lower the overall body stress in your life, this can be of great help in managing panic attacks.
If you find this article useful, do “like” us and give your valuable feedback. Your comments are a pat on our back..
