Fear and anxiousness are normal feelings which help us to deal with dangerous situations. They prepare the body for taking action. But as cognitive (thinking) animals, we create fear in unnecessary situations and it can spiral into larger, more pronounced panic attacks. These unnecessary situations are usually just distortions of normal thoughts. We take a typical situation, like a minor medical ailment or accident and our minds begin creating layers upon layers of exaggerated problems which get further and further away from reality.

Do These Negative Thoughts Plague You?

Magnification: Have you ever done this? Let’s say you cut yourself shaving. You say to yourself, “This cut is really bleeding, I could have leukemia!” So you run out and have a battery of tests performed. Of course, the tests come back negative. This kind of negative thinking is called “magnification” whereby small, even insignificant, situations become the seed to a whole distortion of something bigger and much more worrisome. This leads then feeds your panic engine, possibly triggering an attack or episode.

Another kind of anxiety-inducing negative thought pattern is emotional reasoning. In this case, you start to reason about how you’re feeling, which only solidifies unrealistic thoughts. For example, you might think, “I feel like I’m about to crack up, so I must be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Or “I’m feeling scared right now, I must be really in danger or else I wouldn’t feel this way.” This kind of distortive thinking causes you to leapfrog into evermore unrealistic scenarios, again moving more and more away from what is really happening and feeding that system of panic-inducing hormones.

How To Deal With Panic Anxiety

One of the most successful ways I’ve found to overcome these kinds of negative thought processes is through journaling them and re-reading them to recognize them as they start AND, more importantly, how they ended up to solidify them as being irrational. This method has given me a great amount of personal leverage in controlling my thoughts and staving off larger panic problems. So, let’s say you have a pang of fear over something - it could be anything from a new situation (e.g. “I don’t want to join Toastmasters - they’ll all laugh at me.”) or your inner hypochondriac showing up (e.g. “I hope that stomach pain isn’t appendicitis.”). Write that down.

Next, I try to put down reasons why that fear or anxiousness is irrational. For example, for the Toastmasters scenario, I might write down “Toastmasters is about introducing people to giving presentations. Everybody starting out is new. Nobody will laugh at me.” Same thing with the appendicitis concern. I might even investigate what the real symptoms of appendicitis and even some statistics on how often it occurs in order to write those down next to that irrational thought. At this point, I actively try to reconcile my thoughts with reality - trying to influence my thinking in order to stop propping up distorted realities - hopefully keeping any escalation into a panic attack at bay.

Lastly, I write down the outcome. Was the Toastmaster’s meeting embarrassing? No? People where actually helpful and nice? I note that. Was the stomach ache just gas? I write that down too. I then study these to recognize my patterns of thinking and how they actually turn out, cementing in my mind how these thoughts no longer serve a useful purpose.

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