Panic Disorder - How To Cope With It?

The best way to overcome panic attacks is to educate yourself and train your mind to respond to the panic in acceptable and calming ways. In order to get over panic attacks, you will require responses that are different from what you normally do. If you keep trying the same means, you cannot expect different results. If you are willing to be relieved from anxiety, you shall have to try different methods.

You may try the following steps to help yourself cope with panic attacks:

1. Acknowledge and accept: This is the first step to progress. You should face reality instead of ignoring it or pretending that everything is alright. You must acknowledge that you are afraid even, when there is no danger. In order to overcome panic attacks, you should learn to work with it instead of working against it.
2. Wait and watch: By ‘wait’ it means that you should try to be in that position for some time. It’s true that you may feel insane with your fears and panics, but you should slowly count to 10 when you feel you are going crazy. Your fears would try to snatch away your ability to think or rationalize, and by waiting and watching what happens next, you could get a little span of time for regaining those innate abilities.
3. Do something: Once you have already passed through the two initial steps of managing the panic disorder, your next task is meant to comfort yourself. You could do this with some breathing exercises, by talking to yourself and by getting involved with what’s happening around you at the present. It will slowly make you feel comfortable by relaxing those parts of the body that get much tensed.
4. Repeat if required: Now you have already started to feel better, but another wave of panic may attack you all of a sudden. You may feel that your coping strategies didn’t work. At such a point, you could simply follow all the steps from the top to feel better all over again and there’s nothing wrong in going through several cycles.
5. End it: In this final step, you should remind yourself that your panic disorder would end and that all panic disorders end. Your only job is to make yourself feel better and cope with the challenges that you feel during the attack. Gradually, you will feel that those undesired feelings are going away, making you feel relieved.