Stop Anxiety and Panic Attacks

In order to stop anxiety and panic attacks you have to consider what anxiety and panic really are and what they are not.

Anxiety is NOT a mental illness. Anxiety is a normal human process of thinking about what you do not want to have happen. It's "worst case scenario thinking" at it's worst. Your Unconscious Mind does not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. Imagine the worst, and your subconscious reacts with all the same fight of flight bio chemistry as if the horrible future scenarios are real.

Panic Attacks are also not a disease. Panic attacks are a phobic response to a one time learning event. A one time learning event is one that usually has some emotional intensity. For example a friend of mine is a drummer. One day he was using the top of the electric stove for his "drum set" he was playing the two large burners and one of the small ones and was having a great time until he touched the fourth burner which had been recently used. SIZZLE! He burned his hand. His one time learning event was powerful enough so that he never, ever, played drums on the stove again. Now that's an example of a healthy one time learning experience. We are hard wired to learn some of these important lessons in life to avoid dangerous or harmful situations. It's a good thing.

The problem arises when we have an intense one time learning event around something that isn't really life threatening but that we PERCEIVE as life threatening. Say, Billy shoved a frog in your face in 4th grade and it scared you so much you wet your pants. Everybody made fun of you and teased you for a long time about that.

Now you are constantly scanning your surroundings for any indication of frogs or toads... you can get a bad feeling just thinking about them.

So the way panic and anxiety work together is this: At a moment of deep stress or emotional vulnerability you had what you know now was a "panic attack". It felt like you were going to die.

Now, you have anxiety about having another one. You think about the past event and the situation that triggered it and you project those events out into the future and see them happening there.

Your Unconscious Mind does not know the difference between what is happening Now and what is remembered from the past or imagined in the future. It just reacts as if it is happening now and WHAM! you get all the physiological neuro chemical response of a real life threatening situation.

Repeat this enough and it become a hair trigger habit.

Once you understand the neurological process that creates the effect of anxiety/panic you can begin to work with your unconscious mind to disconnect the "circuitry" that is causing the problem.

The tools we have to do this are Hypnosis, NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) Time Line Therapy (tm) and EFT Tapping / Meridian Tapping.

Used separately we can great rapid fast relief. Used together with a client who is willing to take charge of his or her change, the result can seem miraculous.

But the very same processes of one time learning are at work. If we can learn to freak out powerfully and rapidly, we can also learn to do something else more resourceful and effective in a rapid manner as well.