You can take it one step at a time. What you can do is figure out what is causing your symptoms, if you can. Was it something you ate? Are there major changes in your life? Have you caught a cold or another virus? How did you sleep the night before? Do you have too much on your plate? The answers to these questions can help you pinpoint why it’s happening.
Then, add any of the techniques you’ve learned in part two (making fun of it, making it more ridiculous, using a softer version of the “whatever happens, it’s OK” like the “if this turns out to be something bad, I’ll worry about it when I’m sure, not before.”)
Two separate programs are running here:
The symptom you are feeling probably doesn’t mean anything. Your doctor can help you find out. However, even though it could have a medical cause, that still doesn’t mean you should...
...add anxiety on top of it. This has nothing to do with the actual symptom. Anxiety is a choice. And this is where you have the mental power to make a different one.
You decide what you give weight to and what thoughts you follow. The negative voice just gives you options that you are free to decline, as you’ve learned earlier.
Here are some of the options your negative voice will have on the menu:
“Am I going to lose consciousness or will I faint?”
Needless to say, the solution to this remains, “Whatever happens, even if I faint, so be it. It’s OK. I’ll deal with it when and if it happens.”
Now before you get there and master this “whatever” way of thinking, take baby steps and explain to your negative voice that the panic attack system is exactly there so you would not faint.
It’s the fight-or-flight system, not the faint system. It’s rushing blood to your muscles (and thus takes it away from your brain, which explains the light-headedness) so you can punch that danger to the ground or outrun a leopard (or at least try to) if need be. Fainting would get you killed, so it’s not on the menu during an actual panic attack.
“I need to get the *&%! out of here.”
Look around. Are you surrounded by a real threat? If yes, please do get out of there quickly. If not—and this is obviously the most probable outcome—stay. Let it come. Decide to no longer let your life be dictated by the panic attacks. From now on, you no longer run from them. The anxiety and panic attacks don’t get to decide when you leave, what experiences you miss, how low or high the quality of your life is. You do!
If the panic attack comes, you take it with you. You’ll smother it with so much acceptance and love, it will eventually grow tired of accompanying you!
Besides the “whatever happens it’s OK,” it’s also beneficial to say, “Bring it on. I’m going to stay, and I want to see what happens. Let’s find out if it really is as bad as my negative voice wants me to believe.” This is powerful, and I’ve discussed it in detail before.
What you’re feeling during a panic attack is already the pinnacle of what anxiety has in store. It cannot get worse; you’re already there.
Furthermore, a full-blown panic attack can only last a couple of minutes. The adrenaline you’re feeling will be taken back up by organs like your liver; it will pass! Even if you stay.
Do you know what the benefit of leaving is? Why does your anxiety often calm down when you do leave?
Once you reach your safe place, you’ll probably think it’s over. You’re saved. As a result, your anxiety will drop. Can you see why?
It’s because you told yourself so! You calmed yourself down by telling yourself you’re safe. The physical danger, in that safe place, is as small as it was in the place you were previously in. So why not stay there and calm your mind and body down there, on the spot?
It works just as well. And the added benefit is that you won’t have to keep avoiding that location in the future. At first, it will take you five to twenty minutes to calm down, which is a bit more than if you sought out the exit and left. But the long-term consequences are so much better since you communicate to your mind and body that you no longer fear the fear.
And that’s always the best choice to make.
The Body
The body is an often overlooked part of most panic attack and anxiety treatments. Whenever I visited my doctor while I still suffered from panic attacks, agoraphobia, social phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder, my doctor never talked about my body or asked anything about how I was treating it. I’ve explained before that my dog’s vet always asked what I had been feeding him. I wondered why my doctor never asked me about this.
Thinking of my dog, Amadeus, and the effect food apparently had on his symptoms and ailments, I wondered if many of the strange sensations and symptoms I had (the ones where the doctor always told me, “You’re fine, Geert. You’re in great health. I can’t find anything. Bye bye!”) were actually caused by what I was eating and drinking.
I started a food log and diary, and every time I felt a strange symptom like a headache, dizziness, nausea, tingling sensations, dry mouth, or anything else, I noted:
What I had been eating/drinking up to 24 hours prior to the symptom
What I had smelled up to 24 hours prior to the symptom (perfumes, chemical odors, new car smell, paint, new furniture, old building smell, musky smells)
What I had applied on my skin or otherwise been in physical contact with (shampoo, shaving cream, toothpaste)
Where I had been
What I had been thinking about (the negative thoughts I had had)
It took me a couple of weeks until I began to see the first possible correlations. I had a serious headache every time I drank a diet drink with an artificial sweetener. I felt nauseated a couple of hours after I had smelled new car smell, regular laundry detergent, certain perfumes, and other toxic smells. MSG, yeast extract, and other taste enhancers made me nauseous and dizzy. My fluoride-containing toothpaste made me nauseous and light-headed, and shampoos and soaps with sodium lauryl sulfate and other toxins gave me severe vertigo as soon as thirty minutes after using them.
My body was reacting to a lot of substances. And when I read Never Be Sick Again by Raymond Francis, what I had been suspecting was confirmed. If you have a chemical overload in your body, you can feel very sick, even be very sick. And in some cases, your doctor will not find anything. Your body is fine but became hyper sensitive to certain chemicals and unnatural substances. More and more people have chemical sensitivities these days because our cells are confronted with more toxic substances than ever before in the history of mankind.
What you react to might be different, but in the more than ten years I’ve been helping people who suffered from panic attacks and anxiety, I’ve seen that a lot of people were in fact reacting to certain ingredients, especially sensitive people plagued by unwanted anxiety and weird bodily sensations their doctors cannot explain. Starting the abovementioned diary can help, because your body is always communicating what it likes and dislikes.
Aside from that, we can also use the body to significantly alleviate anxiety.
Abdominal Breathing
Almost every therapist will teach you abdominal breathing. Although it is somewhat helpful, it is not sufficient to overcome anxiety. That’s fine. I suggest you still use it. Abdominal breathing helps because it would be impossible to breathe calmly through the abdomen as you are running for your life while being chased by a real predator.
By choosing to breathe slowly through the abdomen, you’re communicating to your entire body and especially the amygdala that the anxiety response was wrong and that there is no danger. As we’ve seen there are many ways to communicate to the amygdala that it was wrong. Here we’re using the body to do so.
You can practice abdominal breathing by lying down on your back, by putting one hand on your chest and the other hand on your tummy. As you breathe in and out, only the hand on your tummy should move. You can find lots of clips on YouTube showing you how to practice abdominal breathing, and we also do it in the relaxation session you can download f
rom my website, on: geertbook.com
You breathe in slowly through the nose for about 3-5 seconds. Then you hold your breath for another 3-5 seconds. Then you breathe out through the mouth for about 4-8 seconds.
If you practice this enough while you’re in a calm state of mind, this breathing pattern will slowly start to become your new way of automatic breathing throughout the day. When you’re anxious, however, and especially if you’re experiencing a panic attack, you will be breathing from your chest. This will be increasing the anxiety and possibly even pushing you into hyperventilation mode (where you get too much oxygen in your blood). At that point, consciously decide to practice your abdominal breathing.
At first, this will freak your body out. As you start to breathe slower, your heart rate will go up even more. Don’t stop then! Your body is simply screaming, “No, no! There’s no time for abdominal breathing now, what are you thinking? DANGER! I need blood in the muscles!”
Hang in there. You need to have the final word. If you continue to practice the abdominal breathing at that time, even though your body gives you a whole range of nervous sensations, your body will soon start to listen and calm down.
That said, you’ll need to apply other techniques as well. Abdominal breathing alone is not sufficient. That’s why this is not the only chapter in this book.
Exercise
I bet I’m not the first one to tell you that you need to exercise to have a healthy body and mind. Yes, they—the ones who have been advocating this forever—were right and there really is no way around it. I used to be lazy, so believe me, I’ve looked. If you don’t fatigue the body by moving around and working out, the excess energy will often surface under the form of anxiety or general nervousness. But there are many more processes in the body, such as your insulin resistance and other hormones, that will perform much better too.
In my more than a decade of helping people, exercise proved to be a very potent anti-anxiety tool for everyone who gave it a try.
Exercise is a two-edged sword, however. Some people go too far and make themselves prone to anxiety and panic attacks by stressing out their body. I’ve had many athletes as clients, who pushed their bodies too far for too long. The physical stress was too great. Excessive stress is too much, be that the physical or the mental version of it.
So what would be a good rule of thumb? It’s important you always feel better the day after you’ve done any form of exercise, not more tired and worn out. If you do feel depleted or sore the day after, decrease the intensity of the exercise.
If you’re not working out at all at the moment, choose something simple like using a stationary bike (I use it for fifteen minutes, three times per week). It’s OK to put it in front of the TV. The best work out for you is the one where you don’t have any excuses not to do it.
I also go for a walk in nature two to three times per week; I walk briskly for about thirty to forty minutes. I choose areas like a field with far views or a forest with lots of birds and plants. As I’m walking, I look at those birds, see the wind going through the trees, and observe the clouds. This is a form of meditation too. It relaxes my entire nervous system since I cannot think about the day’s stresses and worries and focus on the birds. We’ve already seen that this can make the amygdala smaller as well.
It’s very probable you’ve already had thoughts like, “I don’t have time for that.” I get it. Nobody does.
But it is important for many reasons. Harvard Business Review wrote an article in 2015 describing a study performed at the University of Melbourne, Australia, that discovered people who spent time looking at nature, for as little as five minutes, increased their mental performance and productivity.[11]
Another Harvard Business Review article in 2017 cites studies that prove that taking time for silence restores the nervous system.[12] Aha... and that’s exactly what anxious people need!
I soon noticed that I was much more effective and got a lot more work done on the days I did go for that walk, even though I didn’t have time for it. I could work faster and with more concentration compared to the days where I even ate lunch in front of the computer to get more work done. It’s an illusion to think that continuous work helps you get more work done. Your attention starts to drift away quickly after about forty-five minutes, and the quality of your work goes down unless you take some time to recharge.
I’ve made a lot of changes, all based on what my body was telling me. I stopped eating things my body doesn’t know how to use; I started to work out just the right amount for my body, and I made sure I had a good night’s rest almost every night.
And rest assured, the results my clients have had because of what I describe in this very chapter have been amazing too.
Your body is continuously communicating to you. If you don’t feel well, then something is amiss, and you’ll need to make some changes.
Part 3: Putting It into Practice
Now that we’ve dealt with the causes and you’ve learned a wide array of techniques, it’s time to put them into practice. There are a couple of ways to get started.
Jumping Into the Deep End of the Pool
Do you avoid everything that makes you uneasy or downright anxious? Or do you face your fears?
Do you expose yourself to your anxiety and the possible bad outcomes? Or do you run?
Exposure is strong against anxiety because it is your way of saying, “I don’t fear the fear. I will feel fear, but I’ll do it anyway.” That’s strong. Running away gives more power to the anxiety, to what you fear.
If you are avoiding supermarkets, driving, social events, meetings, speeches, flying, or just about anything else because you fear getting a panic attack, anxiety, or another symptom, you are telling yourself that those locations are dangerous.
If you avoid that what you fear, you give it power. So in order to overcome the anxiety and get on with your life, there’s no other way than to expose yourself to that what you fear so much. If you want to tame a wild horse, you’ll have to get on its back and ride it out until the horse accepts you and calms down. If you want to tame the anxiety tiger and turn him into your furry pet, you’ll have to get into its cage and risk getting a scratch or two. We’ve all had to go through this, and this is the way you can break through your anxious conditioning.
It doesn’t work the other way around. Everyone hopes and thinks, “I’ll wait for my anxiety to pass first, then I’ll start doing and exposing myself again.” That’s putting the cart before the horse. It doesn’t work like that.
Exposure is one way to reverse the anxious programming. If you keep doing what scares you and nothing happens, your fear will start to decline. There is, however, an exception to this rule that I’ll deal with in a bit.
If your mind has linked up the anxiety to a certain place, person, thing, or action, you will always have a raised anxiety level when you expose yourself to it again. This cannot be avoided. You’ll have to wean it out slowly and teach your body, step by step, that the anxiety fire alarm is not needed.
Michael is one of my clients. He’s a medical doctor, and he had a major fear of driving on any street that had more than two lanes combined. He would make incredible detours to avoid the highway. What he struggled with most was that he felt like a failure. During our first conversation, he told me, “I’m a doctor, Geert. I understand the body. I shouldn’t be having this stupid anxiety; it’s driving me crazy. I feel like a fraud when I’m helping patients.”
Since Michael hadn’t been driving on highways for a couple of years, exposure was a big part of his path to get over his fears. I first taught him all of the mental techniques he needed to tackle his anxiety. Once he had memorized those, he started to map out areas where he could go for an on-and-off drive, for real.
He got on the highway and then got back off the next exit. Whenever he wasn’t able to manage or decrease his anxiety, which of course happened at first, I asked him to stop the car where it was safe to do so, take out his journ
al, and write down what his negative voice had been saying.
Then I asked Michael to write down how he could have responded (using the techniques I’ve already explained earlier on in the book like questioning the thoughts, using humor, etc.).
Next, Michael got back on the same highway and practiced what he’d just written down. He was very hesitant the first couple of times he tried it. But he gained more confidence each and every time until his anxiety started to flow away. A couple of weeks later, Michael was driving everywhere again, even singing some songs on the radio.
This happens to be another way to deal with anxiety. It’s impossible to sing a song while being chased by a tiger. So the mere fact that you’re singing your favorite song communicates to your body that you are not in any danger. On top of that, it’s a great way to use the energy caused by the adrenaline.
Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks! Page 12
