Anxiety is unavoidable; you’re going to experience high levels of it at various times throughout your life. Some people are lucky enough to never end up accumulating enough anxiety to ever experience a full-fledged anxiety attack while others are unfortunate enough to have a low anxiety tolerance level before an attack occurs.
Anxiety is a mental/emotional issue. While there is anxiety treatment available for people with really bad anxiety problems, most treatment for anxiety involves little more than using positive thinking to stop and prevent anxiety attacks from occurring.
There are four simple steps you can implement to stop an anxiety attack dead in its tracks the moment it occurs. What are these four magical steps? Relax, stop thinking negatively, start thinking positively, and accept your emotions. It sounds crazy, but when implemented correctly these steps can stop any anxiety attack within three minutes. Let’s go a little further in-depth on each step so that you get the basic idea.
There is a really simple technique you can employ in order to relax at any given moment in time; breathing. Take slow, deep breaths and your body will begin to naturally relax no matter what is actually going on in your head. Let your thoughts flow for the moment; just make sure you start breathing accordingly.
Next, you have to get rid of what is causing your anxiety attack in the first place, i.e. those negative thoughts. You can do this in a literal sense by yelling “STOP” aloud. It may seem silly and make you look insane if you have to do it around other people, but yelling “STOP” will interrupt your thought process and stay the negative onslaught that is causing your anxiety attack. You may have to yell a few times but eventually you’ll start having hard time thinking about what caused your anxiety attack to begin with.
By step three you’ll start feeling more like yourself. However, if you stop after step two then you’re likely to just have another panic attack the minute something reminds you of the attack’s initial trigger. To prevent this from happening, say some positive messages aloud. Things like, “I’ve gotten through worse” or “everything is alright, I can get through this” can go a long way in building up a nice force field against future negative thoughts and stimuli.
Lastly, you have to believe it. Positive thoughts do nothing if you don’t let them ingrain themselves into your actual state of mind. Let the positive thoughts and feelings have full control and you’ll have successfully stopped your attack and prevented one from occurring in the near future.