How are panic attacks treated?
How Are Panic Attacks Treated?
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] Suddenly, you feel out of control, and that's a very frightening experience.
The most important step in treating panic attacks is what we call psychoeducation.
That means understanding and normalizing what's going on in your body and in your mind.
What's very frightening about having a panic attack, whether you're a child or a 50-year-old person
who practically runs the world, is that suddenly, you feel out of control. And that's a very frightening experience.
And what happens is that your anxiety about that feeling of being out of control starts to spiral from there.
And you can't help, but think, what's next? Am I going crazy? Am I losing control? What am I going to do?
How do I get out of here? But all of those kind of understandable, but desperate questions only make your anxiety worse.
So understanding that a panic attack is a false alarm. Your body has just, out of the blue,
switched on the fight or flight reaction and is preparing you to defend your life.
Which works great if you're actually in danger, but is very disconcerting when all of those things happen--
your heart racing, your arms and legs feeling funny, feeling lightheaded-- all of those things are very disconcerting when
they happen just in the supermarket or in a meeting. But putting the right label on what's going on is key,
and that's really what psychoeducation is about. You're not in danger. Nothing bad is about to happen. You're having a panic attack.
So having those one liners that you want to say to yourself to immediately downgrade the urgency of the situation
are very important. The next steps, though, in treating panic are learning relaxation techniques
and how to control and change those things that are so uncomfortable, like the racing heartbeat,
like the shallow breathing. And so we teach breathing techniques to breathe calmly
from the diaphragm. And once you have done that, then a real important part
of the therapy is what we call intraceptive exposure. And what that means is on purpose--
you're prepared for this-- but on purpose, we want to bring on some of those feelings and symptoms, like feeling like your heart is racing
or like it's hard to breathe because you're breathing heavily so that you can see by using your good self talk--
I'm not in danger. My body knows how to take care of itself. It will not let me down-- using your good self-talk and your breathing techniques,
you can reverse those uncomfortable feelings. So we may do that by running up and down
the stairs a couple of times to get the heart rate going. And then you see, it's not magic, but you have the ability to quiet down those symptoms.
That helps to restore a great sense of control for people who have panic. Final step is to actually go out and do exposures in the world.
Once you've had a panic attack, whether it's in a restaurant or a movie theater, you want you feel like you need to avoid
those situations for fear that you're going to have a panic attack, again. What the exposure does is help you
to see that even once you have your techniques and strategies and skills, you can use in those situations.
It's not the situation that's the problem. You've got it. That situation was totally safe and fine.
But this way, you prove it to yourself. You go to the restaurant. Maybe you don't sit and have a full meal the first time. Maybe you just go in order takeout or something.
But you expose yourself gradually to those situations that you've avoided to see, you're not
going to have a panic attack. If you're breathing starts to get funny, you're able to calm it back down.
And then more and more the world opens up to you, you're able to return to your previous activities.
mental health behavior
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