How do you stop a panic attack from happening? Or better still, prevent one from happening in the first place. As I explained in what is a panic attack you need to understand that anxiety and a panic attack are not quite the same thing. A panic attack is brought on by severe anxiety which leads to hyperventilation. When you hyperventilate you are breathing too fast or overbreathing which causes you to take in too much oxygen and not maintain enough carbon dioxide. This is what causes the light headedness, numbness in various parts of the body, chest pains and all the things that can make you feel like you are having a heart attack and lose control.

The simple answer to stop anxiety becoming a full blown panic attack is to correct your breathing. This will be harder to do once you are right in the middle of an attack but it is surprisingly easy to do just before you feel an attack coming on. Getting the breathing right will stop the panic attack but my own experience has shown me a few things that might help you if you find the technique isn’t working.

By not allowing yourself to hyperventilate you will stop or prevent an attack from happening but be warned, it won’t stop the feeling of general anxiety. It’s important to realise this, in my years as a sufferer I had tried the breathing techniques and believed they didn’t work. There were two problems, the first one was I never learned the difference between a panic attack and the feeling of bad anxiety, or to be more accurate, the different stages of anxiety. Secondly, I never experimented with the breathing to get it right. What ended up working for me was not how it was described in books or any advice I had found, or more realistically I probably wasn’t doing it correctly. But how would you know if your body is not maintaining enough carbon dioxide?

The answer is you don’t. All you have to remember is if your body is regulating the correct amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide then you won’t have a panic attack. So in other words if you are still getting the attacks then you still don’t have the breathing under control. It’s important that you learn to recognise the various levels of anxiety before it leads to panic, brought on by hyperventilation. If you don’t then you might think the breathing isn’t doing it’s job. The feeling of normal, or even bad anxiety is nothing like a panic attack, they are miles apart and have no similarity.

Anxiety on it’s own can be mild or quite severe. Everyone can get mild anxiety, the feeling of being worried about something would describe it. Severe anxiety is different. This is closer to being extremely fearful of something or waiting around for the possibility of extremely bad news. The tight feeling around the chest, the body tensed up, fast or heavy breathing and completely on edge. Mix this feeling with fear and it will feel quite unpleasant but it’s still not a panic attack. When you have anxiety disorder various levels of those feelings might appear for no apparent reason. When this happens it can easily lead to panic simply because you have no reason to expect it.

A panic attack is horrendous, it can ruin your life, it can debilitate you, it can leave you jobless and lead to agoraphobia. Mild or severe anxiety is nothing like any of that, at it’s worst it’s just a horrible feeling, unpleasant maybe, but that’s all. It doesn’t stop you in your tracks and you can live a perfectly normal life with it and it’s curable (so is anxiety). Because a panic attack always starts with the feeling of anxiety it is difficult at first to separate the two. This was the problem which made it difficult for me to get the breathing right and stop the panic attacks from happening.

Once you understand these things you can start to monitor your breathing and figure out how to get it right. If you are feeling light headed like you are going to pass out, your arms or legs have pins and needles or go numb etc then you can be sure you are breathing incorrectly. Like many things in life, this might take some practice and the only chance you get to try it out is when you are having a bout of bad anxiety. So how should you breath?

I found slight differences among the various pieces of information I found on this subject, although they all said you should breath out for longer than you breath in. Some say you should breath in for five seconds and out for eleven seconds, some say breath very slowly in for three, out for five etc. The trouble here is this alone doesn’t tell you whether or not you have got the balance right. Two different people could breath in for a duration of three seconds and absorb massive differences in the amount of oxygen they took in. I found none of those things working for me. Simply having your in and out breaths guided by a number to count to doesn’t let you know that you are breathing with the correct flow rate.

What did actually work for me is just letting my inward breath do whatever I felt my body wanting to do naturally, whether that was a large long intake or short, light or heavy, just whatever feels right at the moment and it might be something different with each inward breath. The outward breath is simple, I tighten up my lips like I am about to whistle and simply let out as much breath as I can for as long as I can without forcing it too hard but still using some force. If I tried to breath out too softly then it didn’t work. For you it might be something different, you will have to experiment but just remember if you are still having full blown panic attacks then you still have not got the breathing right and you are probably taking in too much oxygen.

Believe me you can get it right with practice. All that’s left then is to deal with normal anxiety, which incidentally I do still suffer from although it’s not as bad as it used to be, it’s easy to live with and doesn’t stop me from doing anything. I can live a normal life once again. Even this can be cured, I still follow some of the things outlined in the Linden method and my anxiety is getting better all of the time but because it’s now at a stage that’s easy to live with I have become a bit lazy. Mild anxiety isn’t a big deal in my life but panic attacks were, and now they are not!

The Linden Method - Stop General Anxiety and Panic Attack Fast!

Filed under: Anxiety