You gotta dig deep and understand your own mind. It doesn’t mean you won’t experience the intrusive thoughts, but you’ll be better able to kinda surf on them with reduced or eliminated stress from them.
Cognitive behavioral therapy can help faster than any home brew methodology to get for to where you can ride the experience out and not have it mess you up a lot. But meditation, specifically mindfulness meditation (though any type you can do will help), gives you part of those tools with less/no need for guidance from the outside.
Progressive relaxation helps too, where you go through your body clenching then relaxing the muscles of your body from head to toe (or toe to head) so that you’re using your mind to control your body. This allows the brain a chance to kinda reset, and it leaves your body in a neutral state conducive to good rest.
What those have in common is breath control. Panic comes from a spiral of both mental and physical sources. Since you can’t directly tell your adrenal glands to stop dumping on you, or flip a switch to shift brain waves instantly, you have to engage the part of our system that can be directly controlled.
Luckily, controlling our breathing is a magic key to open up our autonomic systems. It slows heart rate, which in turn slows down the brain (eventually) and ramps down the fight/flight response that makes panic attacks so damn horrible.
And, truth is, even though there’s drugs that will stop or slow a panic attack, they tend to take roughly the same amount of time to work as any of the stuff I mentioned, once you practice them a while. So, while the drugs will help short term, you can’t always take them, and they don’t help fix the underlying issues.
Any pointers to make it better?
Asking for someone else
You gotta dig deep and understand your own mind. It doesn’t mean you won’t experience the intrusive thoughts, but you’ll be better able to kinda surf on them with reduced or eliminated stress from them.
Cognitive behavioral therapy can help faster than any home brew methodology to get for to where you can ride the experience out and not have it mess you up a lot. But meditation, specifically mindfulness meditation (though any type you can do will help), gives you part of those tools with less/no need for guidance from the outside.
Progressive relaxation helps too, where you go through your body clenching then relaxing the muscles of your body from head to toe (or toe to head) so that you’re using your mind to control your body. This allows the brain a chance to kinda reset, and it leaves your body in a neutral state conducive to good rest.
What those have in common is breath control. Panic comes from a spiral of both mental and physical sources. Since you can’t directly tell your adrenal glands to stop dumping on you, or flip a switch to shift brain waves instantly, you have to engage the part of our system that can be directly controlled.
Luckily, controlling our breathing is a magic key to open up our autonomic systems. It slows heart rate, which in turn slows down the brain (eventually) and ramps down the fight/flight response that makes panic attacks so damn horrible.
And, truth is, even though there’s drugs that will stop or slow a panic attack, they tend to take roughly the same amount of time to work as any of the stuff I mentioned, once you practice them a while. So, while the drugs will help short term, you can’t always take them, and they don’t help fix the underlying issues.