Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks!

by Geert Verschaeve

  “Wow, I’m not sure I can do this,” Rianne told me.

  I asked her what’s the worst that can happen? The absolute worst?

  “Well,” she said. “I could faint and people will think I’m weak!”

  “OK,” I said. “If you now compare all of the limiting anxiety you’ve felt for years, all of the depressing moments you’ve had because of this fear, what’s worse: people seeing you faint once and worst case having a good laugh about it, or you continuing to feel that fear for decades to come?”

  “Oh, that fear without a doubt,” she replied. That was all she needed in order to give it a try.

  She sent me an e-mail a couple of days later with lots of smiley faces and a very upbeat tone of voice. She had found a long queue and as expected, the dizziness came quickly.

  Her negative voice tried to take over and asked her to leave as quickly as she could. “NO,” she said this time. “If I faint here in front of all of these people, so be it. I want to see what happens. Bring it on, let’s do this!”

  To her big surprise, the dizziness increased.

  “This isn’t working,” her negative voice jumped in quickly, ready to help as always. “Get out of here!”

  “NO,” she repeated. “I don’t care whether it’s working or not, I want you to get bigger, bring it on! Show me what you’ve got.”

  This time, the dizziness didn’t increase. It had already reached its peak, “Come on,” she added. “Is that all you got? Bring it on! Let’s do this!”

  She started to feel stronger and stronger. About ten minutes into this experience, the dizziness started to subside.

  Nothing bad had happened. She didn’t run; she didn’t pop a pill. She did nothing besides using the “let’s do this” technique. And the dizziness and other symptoms went away on their own.

  The next day she tried again, still savoring the victory she had had the day before. Sure enough, the dizziness came, but this time it only lasted for a minute or two. Two days later, there was no dizziness at all. She couldn’t believe it. All of these years she had been trying to avoid her anxiety when all she had to do was embrace it, accept it, and say, “Whatever, I give up. Show me what you got.”

  Well... it had nothing.

  The moment you courageously say, “Bring it on. Let’s do this!” is the moment you’ve just won the first of a couple of battles. Your intentions have changed!

  Like the kid, you’ve decided you will no longer run, dodge, or do anything other than embrace it. You have decided to no longer fear the fear. And that’s the natural way to overcome anxiety. This is how we’ve been programmed all along.

  When our amygdala or another part of our brain thinks something is a danger, we can say, “You’re right!” and run for the hills or search for the exit. This keeps the anxiety and panic attack in place. We’ve just proven it was dangerous by running. The anxiety will now rise each and every time we get into a similar situation. But it’s also the moment to say, “No, no, that’s not something to be afraid of! That’s not a real and imminent threat like being chased by a swarm of African killer bees!”

  If anxiety is currently limiting parts of your life, create the intention to live your life, to face those fears, to embrace them—not to control, manage, or avoid—but to truly embrace them and immerse yourself. If and when you do, they will go away (but again, that’s not the goal. It can’t be or you would be feeding the anxiety).

  I know what I’ve just described is scary, by definition, so please do feel free to use any or all of the other techniques in combination with the “let’s do this” technique I defined in this chapter.

  Some fears however don’t allow you to expose yourself to them. People who fear diseases or serious health problems for instance don’t need to try and catch that dangerous flu or whatever they fear.

  Here too, however, it’s the mindset that counts. The “whatever happens, it’s OK” is still at play. I feared having a heart attack when I was an agoraphobic, and I had a slight preference to not expose myself to one. I could nevertheless still use the “whatever happens, it’s OK” attitude and decided to say, “I’ll let my heart do whatever it wants to do. If this is my moment to go, so be it. Bring it on!” And of course, nothing happened. The grim reaper still didn’t come for me.

  If you choose to no longer fear the worst possible outcome, fear will no longer have any grip on you.

  Use Your Imagination

  Studies show that our minds don’t know the difference between what’s real and what we vividly imagine. That’s why nightmares can feel so real and even give physical symptoms like waking up in a sweaty full state of panic.

  Our imagination is strong. A study done at the University of Ohio in 2014 showed we can actually get muscle growth by vividly imagining we’re working out our muscles.[8] Can you picture it? Building muscle by vividly imagining you’re working out. Our bodies operate in ridiculously interesting ways.

  What we imagine has a profound effect on our entire body and the emotions we feel.

  Elite athletes have used this method for a very long time. Even to this day, racecar drivers will simulate the circuit in their head. They close their eyes and imagine driving around the track, steering, braking, shifting, and more. This prepares their body and their mind.

  When they’re then on the real track, it will feel as if they’ve just done a couple of practice runs already. Because they did! I’ll show you how you can use your imagination in relation to anxiety, phobias, and panic attacks in this chapter.

  The first trick is to use meditation. Some people are apprehensive when they hear this word because they link it to spirituality or certain religions. It’s totally unrelated, and I’ll prove it. Not that there’s anything wrong with spirituality by the way.

  You can download the relaxation session that comes with the audio course that my clients follow, for free, right here: geertbook.com. I will send you the links to the most recent version. Please download it and put it on an MP3 player, your smartphone, or your tablet.

  You can use this session to simply relax, however, this relaxation session serves another major goal. An interesting study found that meditation and other forms of relaxation have the power to shrink the amygdala, thus allowing you to become much more calm, cool, collected and more importantly, confident.[9]

  As you may remember, your amygdala is the anxiety-radar you have built into your head. If the amygdala is large and active, a lot of dangers will be seen.

  Whilst most studies looked at brain activity during meditation, one study from the University of Boston looked at brain scans before and twelve weeks after meditation.[10] They found that test persons had a significant decrease in their stress response twelve weeks after having meditated. Not only that, their amygdala, the center of fear, had actually shrunk. How amazing! Meditation is making physical changes in our body that help us face life much better.

  As you are relaxing and meditating a bit, there is another way you can use your imagination. In your imagination, you’re the director of what happens. So you can imagine doing what scares you and not experiencing any problems. The worst outcome doesn’t happen, on the contrary, the best possible outcome appears.

  For example, someone afraid of public speaking sees herself giving a speech in front of a large audience. As the speech went smoothly, she gets a standing ovation and loud applause that goes on and on. Someone with a fear of flying gets on a plane and sees himself having fun with the crew or sees herself smiling and sitting totally relaxed in her seat.

  As you’ll use this technique, you can choose to experience everything from your own perspective (first person) or from a camera standpoint, as if you’re looking at yourself doing it from a third perspective. Pick whatever works best for you.

  With this technique, you’ll train your mind to experience what scares you over and over again, without anything going wrong. If and when you then face the situation you fear in real life, your mind/body will also think, “I’v
e been here, I’ve got this! Nothing bad happened the last X times I was here.”

  If you’ve never used your imagination like this, I bet you’re skeptical. That’s OK, everyone is. You, however, already have a lot of experience with this technique. Every time you thought “what if?” and imagined everything going wrong, you were using your imagination to make it worse. We’re using the same system here but in the opposite way. You’ve seen the negative powers of using your imagination. Now let’s use the positive side.

  Please try this for at least four weeks. It takes a while before you’ll get the desired result because you are reprogramming the way your mind responds to that specific situation. You’ll start to see it’s very powerful.

  On a side note, before I had my Lasik eye surgery a decade ago, I went in for a first appointment a couple of months prior to the surgery, to see if I was eligible. There was a large TV in the waiting room with live footage from the operation currently taking place by the surgeon. Yes, you could see the eye get cut open and then lasered, live.

  At first, I didn’t get it. I thought, “Does the surgeon not want to have any clients left? Does he really want to scare everyone away by showing real live pictures of knives and lasers cutting into eyes? Most horror movies even stay away from the good old eye cutting... Why not show some funny cat videos instead?”

  Only now as I’m writing this book does it dawn on me why he did that. He was exposing everyone to the surgery. Everyone had one or two appointments prior to the operation, and then the day of the operation the TV would be there too.

  By the time I was on that table ready to get my eyes done, I had seen about ten surgeries. My mind was ready. I wasn’t afraid. Cutting my hair and cutting my eyes felt like the exact same thing to me. Well, almost.

  Yes, our minds indeed work in ridiculous ways.

  How to Feel Safe Wherever You Are

  Feeling at ease wherever you are can drastically reduce your overall stress level and especially the load you put on your central nervous system. It also creates a life that’s more enjoyable. Just imagine when “wherever you are” becomes your safe place.

  This is something I personally had to practice a lot. When I was an agoraphobic, I only felt safe in my own house, and even there, panic attacks started to plague me. The farther I was from my safe spot, the more my anxiety rose. It was necessary for me to learn to feel at home wherever I was and not even need restrooms or other places I could run to.

  While I was working on overcoming my agoraphobia, anxiety, and panic attacks, I had to think of something my aunt once told me when I was about six years old.

  She heard me singing while I was walking through her house and said, “Geert, I like how you feel at home wherever you are.” She was right. Aside from staying over at her house, I often joined my aunt and uncle on vacation and wherever I was, was my home. I always felt safe and didn’t worry, regardless of the situation I was in.

  “That kid is still inside you,” I thought.

  But there was more work to do. I wanted to feel at home even when my mind would think of all of the bad possible outcomes related to where I was.

  That’s the difference. At the age of six I hadn’t seen how bad the world could be, how tough it is out there. I had no scars yet and very little negative experiences. I hadn’t even touched a warm iron for the first time or tried to cuddle a furry bumblebee. So it’s pretty logical my mind wasn’t warning me too often. If it only knew...

  Still, even at the age of six, the world was a dangerous place, yet I was living in it with full confidence and lots of fun. It is always our perception that makes the difference.

  I decided to install a new belief: “I always have me, with me. And that’s all I need. Me. My mind. I myself am the safe person. I don’t need anyone else, nor do I need another place I can run to.”

  I engrained this new belief both by using it as an affirmation and by repeating it whenever my negative voice tried to stir up agoraphobic thoughts.

  I started to feel at home again, wherever I was. And if anything bad would happen, I would deal with it then and there. I wouldn’t flee or search for a safe spot. Then and there would be fine, wherever that was.

  Was I right? Yes. Because in the end, my home wasn’t any safer or more unsafe than anywhere else. Fainting, losing consciousness, vomiting, dying and all the things I feared would be as bad for my health regardless of where I was. The only difference was that, at home, other people wouldn’t see it. There would be no social stigma.

  Was the opinion of other people that valuable that I was willing to live most of my life in my own home, foregoing plenty of great experiences we should all have as human beings? After years of being an agoraphobic, I finally decided it wasn’t. I had had enough of my overgeneralizing.

  I had been living with the illusion that everyone only liked me if I didn’t faint or make a fool out of myself.

  It turns out there will always be three groups of people: those who dislike you, those who are indifferent or undecided, and those who like you.

  It’s impossible to become a version of you that would eradicate the group that dislikes you. That group will always be there. This realization helped me a lot. I could stop trying to be so perfect. If nobody dislikes you, you must be living under a rock. As soon as you come into contact with other people, some will love you, some will like you, some won’t care, some will dislike you, and some will hate you for no reason at all. That’s how it has always been. Whenever you come in contact with other people, you’ll be classifying them into these groups as well (liking, loving, indifferent, disliking).

  Plus, what other people think of you has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.

  Open a great bottle of red wine and let two people taste it. One can like it; the other can tell you she prefers white wine. This says nothing about the wine, and everything about the opinions, likes, and dislikes these two people have.

  On top of that, if we ever do say something foolish or act foolishly and other people freak out about it, that’s really their responsibility and not ours. We cannot control their freaking out or lack thereof.

  How to Deal with a Fear of Failure

  As with most fears, fear of failure is just another way that your mind can play tricks on you.

  In general, the thought process will go like this: “I’m not going to make it/pass, and then bad things will happen. People will think I’m weak or a loser, I don’t want to ruin the great image people have of me or I won’t get this or that and my life will be pretty abysmal from there on out.” This is a clear example of catastrophizing, a mind game.

  The true cause of fear of failure and the inability to proceed is the weight you put on the outcome.

  Let’s look at an example. An area most men have, for instance, felt a fear of failure in is walking up to a woman, introducing themselves and asking for her phone number.

  How come?

  The two causes are the weight they put on the outcome and what they decide a failure is.

  Here’s what a typical guy could then think: “If I introduce myself to her and she dismisses me, if I ask for her phone number and she says no, if she doesn’t like me... I’ll be a loser. I’ll then be sure that I will never find a great girlfriend and have confirmation that I’m a loser. Right now, I’m at least a legend in my own mind. Having it confirmed that I’m not the greatest man alive would hurt so much that I prefer to not even find out what she’ll say. I need to avoid the pain that would come with the possible rejection. So forget about it, I’m staying here, standing alone in the corner, looking at my phone and pretending to be busy and important. That’s what legends do!”

  If that’s your belief, you wouldn’t walk over and introduce yourself to a potential romantic partner. The risk and pain are too high indeed. Getting rejected would set in motion the end of everything, and who in their right mind wants that to happen?

  And I’m using a relationship example here, but you can of course
apply this to all things where you’re afraid to take the next step, out of risk of failure and impending doom.

  As always, this problem is created in our own heads. What we say to ourselves is always crucial. If your life will be over whenever something you partake in doesn’t go as planned, how on earth would you ever be able to do it without fear? If it’s that important, you should fear it, lie awake, and worry about it constantly!

  Or should you?

  Of course not! Most often failing wouldn’t be a disaster at all. If our nervous guy with sweaty armpits would walk up to 200 women and introduce himself, 199 could tell him to take a hike, buy some deodorant, and reject him, but one could turn out to be the best girlfriend he could ever have dreamed of. Would those rejections then be a bad thing? Of course not. Every rejection would lead him closer to “the one.”