Month: April 2024

Let’s face it, panic attacks are rubbish. One minute you’re relaxing, the next you’re drowning in sweat, convinced your heart’s about to explode. If that’s happened to you, fear not! Panic attacks are super common, and there are ways to overcome them and to learn more about yourself through the process.

It is important to be aware that from negative events, positive learning can take place and taking this mental position is also important in the healing process.

What’s a Panic Attack Anyway?

Imagine your body’s alarm system going haywire. That’s basically a panic attack. Your heart races, you breathe like you’ve just sprinted a marathon, and your mind fills with terrifying thoughts. It’s horrible, but remember, it’s not dangerous. It is simply your body’s way of trying to keep you safe, with the threat (fight or flight) reactions being triggered. It is also important to remember that just because you may be having panic attacks, it is not a life sentence meaning that you will always have them. This is not the case and it may also be useful to mentally place the symptoms in the context of the specific time, place and space in which you are in. In other words. panic may be telling you that something is making you feel anxious and unsafe at that moment in your life. Exploring what that may be, is an important part of the therapeutic journey.

Calming the Panic: Top Tips

• Breathe Easy: Deep breaths are your best friend. Try the 4-4-6 technique: breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4, and exhale slowly (through pursed lips) for 6. Repeat until you feel calmer.
• Ground Yourself: Feeling disconnected? The “5-4-3-2-1” method can help. Name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste.
• Focus on Facts: Panic attacks make you think the worst, but challenge those thoughts! Ask yourself, “Is this situation really life-threatening?” Chances are, it’s not.
• Find Your Mantra: Repeat a calming phrase like “This will pass” or “I am in control” to anchor yourself during an attack.
• Move Your Body: Light exercise can burn off adrenaline and ease anxious energy. Go for a walk, do some skipping, or dance like nobody’s watching (because, well, they probably aren’t).

Bonus Tip: Talk About It! Don’t bottle things up. Chat to a friend, family member, therapist or GP about what’s going on. Talking can be a huge weight off your shoulders. Talking also helps you to contextualise your experiences of having panic attacks.

Getting Long-Term Help

If panic attacks are a regular pain, therapy can be a game-changer. A therapist can help you understand your triggers and develop coping mechanisms. In the UK, you can talk to your GP about getting referred for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which is a great option for anxiety. As a therapist using CBT as part of my therapeutic practise, I’ve seen firsthand how effective it can be in helping people overcome panic attacks. CBT helps you identify negative thought patterns that contribute to anxiety and develop healthier ways of thinking. It also equips you with practical tools to manage panic attacks in the moment and reduce their frequency over time.

Remember: Panic attacks are rubbish, but they are not reflective of you or your self-worth. With the right tools and support, you can totally take back control. Lastly don’t be afraid to ask for help!

“I really think I can’t see the positive even though I know that I have good things in my life. My brain just goes to the negative and I think about problems that may be coming up. It seems that I am in a cycle”.

This was a client that I worked with some six months ago who voiced an issue that many people have. She was not clinically diagnosed with any condition and she was not on any medication. However, she said that at points she had low moods though they lifted the next day and she “got on with life”. Having asked about her medical and past social history of experiences, it was clear that this was an issue that was not impeding her life, but it was affecting her quality of life.

Many people sadly experience this type of thought process – a form of mental filtering towards the negative. It is nothing to be ashamed about and it is important to be able to voice such concerns with loved ones, or with counsellors and therapists, since shame, guilt and self-blame simply compound the issue and also add to low moods.

It is important to remember that our minds work in a certain way. They work from experiences that have happened to us, perceptions that we form over time, things that key people have said to us when we were growing up and patterns of behaviours that we exhibited early in our life as a way of ‘surviving’ or ‘fitting in’. In other words, our brains work on a daily basis through patterns that reflect these past events which have been tried and tested over time. The problem is that some of these thoughts and behaviours that we have become used and accustomed to, may not be helpful in later points in our lives. Allied to this is the fact that the limbic system which manages our long term memory, emotional and stress responses, is a key and integral ‘older’ part of our brain and has developed over millions of years to keep us safe. This also means that in keeping us safe, our brains naturally work in the background, much like an automatic virus checker in a computer, ensuring that we remain safe in a potentially unsafe world, where today there are different types of stressors.

Additionally, if we take on this perspective, our brains are therefore always subtly scanning for risk whilst we remain in the conscious world during the day. Therefore, if  someone has been through life experiences which may have been difficult or troubling, their brain may well have become hyper-sensitized to risk and thereby slants the individual towards looking at life through the lens of having to overcome obstacles or of another problem potentially coming round the corner. It is therefore understandable that my client had started to view life through that lens. It was also understandable that in thinking and feeling that there were obstacles that could come up and with these thoughts recurring in her mind, that her mood was affected. This form of mental filtering towards the negative, sometimes with catastrophising, is called a cognitive distortion.

There are a number of ways of reducing these cognitive distortions though they need time and a commitment from the individual who is affected. They need a form of positive mental and emotional self-investment, a realisation that a change in mindset can happen, is possible and achievable; that just because difficult situations happen, they do not need to be viewed as a catalogue of problems, or ‘another thing that goes bad in my life’. Difficult things happen, but life also throws up many joys in the day, with sometimes the smallest of things that can bring joy to us. It is about recognising this, embracing it, and really holding those small positive moments of joy, colour, vibrancy or company that we are blessed with. By doing so, this is also a form of acceptance, of resetting what is important to individuals and in raising their capacity to see joy and goodness in the world.

So what are the things that can help to reduce cognitive distortions like negative mental filtering? Firstly, stress reduction can really help. Anything that adds significant stress, such as smoking, drinking high quantities of coffee or caffeinated colas need to be reduced or ideally, removed from their lifestyle. Things like meditation and mindfulness can really help, by allowing the individual to have the space to realise that the brain is going through an old pattern that can be changed over time and that the person has ultimate control over this. Sometimes this basic awareness can help to reduce the strength of the emotions that may be thrown up by the negative thoughts, especially if they are self-deprecating.

Other things that can help include taking up exercise, building a circle of friends and ensuring that there is regular communication with them. This person to person connectivity is important for us as a species. Also, listing the pattern of negative thoughts and reasons and facts that challenge the negative thoughts and which resonate well with the individual, are another way of helping to chip away and reframe thinking over time. This also needs to be practised regularly. Positive visualisation can also help and this involves taking some 10-20 minutes out of the day to find a quiet space in which someone can close their eyes, and visualise a safe, warm and comfortable place that they have been to. It could be anywhere in the world that they have visited. Visualisation is another technique that helps in giving positive meaning and in strengthening positive feelings.

Lastly, therapy and counselling can really help and depending on commitment, people can see real benefits in a short period of time. Finally, it is important to remember that we are the drivers of change. This means that we can also change the way that we see the world externally, whilst also changing the way that we experience negative thoughts or feelings. We may not be able to wholly erase the latter, but therapy can certainly reduce the impact of them on daily life.

In my work with clients who have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), there are many techniques that I use to help or assist them in their journey around understanding the condition that affects them.

In this article, I am going to look at some self-compassionate ways of thinking that can help to reduce the impacts of intrusive thoughts. I also need to point to the language that I am using and some people may use the term ‘countering negative thoughts’. This is potentially problematic in working with OCD since countering something gives the impression that it needs to be ‘challenged’ or ‘pushed back’ or countered as though there is some kind of mental ping pong between negative intrusive thoughts and positive counter-challenge thoughts. This simply may re-enforce or cycle the possibility of more intrusive thoughts affecting someone.

So the following positive cognitions are thoughts that can be placed into an acceptance framework, and internally repeated once or twice when an intrusive negative thought comes into mind. It is important not to get into a repetitive pattern of using the positive cognitions to ‘push away’ or to suppress negative intrusive thoughts and this feeds into the ‘thinking ping-pong’ that simply re-enforces and gives more weight to intrusive thoughts. Remember, it is the depth and weight of the meaning given to intrusive thoughts that makes them ‘sticky’ and impactful. This in turn generates a heightened state of anxiety that fuels ongoing OCD ruminations.

Also, when I speak of an ‘acceptance framework’, I am suggesting that people with OCD take time to accept that intrusive thoughts will come and go. Additionally, the general public all have  intrusive thoughts, though it is how quickly they disengage and move on from the thinking that separates people with OCD and those who don’t experience the condition. Accepting negative ruminations does not make the thoughts true or that they are part of your identity. They are simply thoughts and they will have a cycle of their own – they will come and go. It is how much weight, consideration and gravity an individual gives to them which fuels them. So, being an unresponsive to them as possible, will limit their hold on people.

So, here are some elements of positive ‘self-talk’ that can be used to undermine negative ruminatory thoughts. Again. they are to be repeated once or twice in relation to a specific negative rumination. Individuals should take the time to see which statements resonate within them and ensure that the negative rumination is allowed to come and pass, after the statements are repeated internally a few times. This means that individuals should in a way, retrain themselves in staying in the present and allowing any OCD related ruminations to fall away as they don’t give the thoughts credibility or strength by fearing the thoughts.

Positive Self-Thinking Statements

1. “It is ok, I recognise that this is part of my OCD and the thoughts will pass. They don’t reflect who I am”.
2. “I realise that the OCD is part of historical fears that I had and which are not relevant today. They are just resonances from history and ‘background noise’. I can switch off from them”.
3. “I know who I am and what my values are. My OCD thoughts do not reflect who I am and the core values of what I stand for”.
4. “OCD thoughts are the mirror opposite of my values. That is why I get anxious. This means that my core values are moral, open and value the world and people around me”.
5. “My brain is simply doing its thing and what it learnt it in the past. It does not mean that it is true, it is following an old pathway of thoughts”.
6. “Just because I think it, does not make it true. It simply means that there are thoughts that are not valid or true that I think of and which I can ultimately disengage from. They are not me”.