Overcoming Panic Attacks

Overcoming panic attacks is not an easy thing to do. In fact, many people who have tried to do that have failed miserably. It’s almost impossible to stop panic attacks, because it’s something that happens on autopilot in your brain. There is no conscious control involved, and something that is outside of conscious control is very hard to change when all you have is willpower.

Sure, there are all kinds of therapies that will try to find the root cause of your phobia. And in many cases that is true. There actually was ONE particular moment where you “learned” to be phobic. Usually that moment led to a couple of other reactions in different situations, until that phobia generalized in your neural circuits, so that each time a given trigger appeared, your brain reacted with a panic attack.

It’s important to realize here that this trigger doesn’t have to be something external. Sure, in many cases it`s a spider that you see, or a certain sound that you hear – but it can also be something that is not really happening on the outside, but an internal experience. It can even be a subconscious thought. (This explains why some people have panic attacks, seemingly without any cause. But in fact, there is a cause, there is a trigger – but that trigger is outside of conscious awareness).

The thing is that focusing on the trigger or cause won’t help you to better cope with panic attacks – let alone is a way of overcoming panic attacks. And it’s one of the main reasons why panic attacks drive so many people into desperation who try to do something about them. Because they spend all this time trying to overcome their panic using METHODS THAT DON’T WORK. And when you invest all that time in methods that don’t work, and you try really hard and give it your best, you will be very frustrated, because it STILL doesn’t work. And it will seem as if there is nothing you can do to stop your panic attacks or anxiety.

But the simple truth is: there ARE methods that work. And they work straight away. They work fast. You don’t need to spend months (let alone years!) in some kind of therapy. THere are quiet a lot of therapists who make a good living with panic disorder treatments that take years (and don’t work) – but since the patients are coming back (because they think that the reason why their panic problem doesn’t improve is that overcoming panic takes years, not that the method doesn’t work – the therapists have a full practice. Compare that to a therapist who cure people within less than a month. Long-term therapies are a lot more profitable to therapists, and once you have done it a certain amount of years, it’s hard to admit that it’s not working, or that there might be a “quick cure”. I’m not saying that there therapists are bad, or that they purposefully stop you from overcoming panic attacks- but they have learned to treat panic disorders in a certain way, they have specialized on that method, and there’s a very high mental barrier to overcome to “switch” to a fast and easy method. Simply because spend so many years “learning” why it takes years to treat panic disorder patients.