Danielle Jhiani, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, teaches an exposure-based technique to reduce panic attacks through acceptance. Tell yourself you might have an attack to lower fear, then when symptoms come, notice them, breathe, and use self-statements like "Yes, I'm anxious. I can handle this." Results take repeated practice but rewire your brain's fear response.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. Helping people recover just like I did so you can have happy, healthy relationships with an amazing life. I want to talk about how to end panic attacks for good. If you get panic attacks, it can either come on slowly or come on more quickly. There's usually an onset of a physical feeling, maybe shortness of breath, a racing heart. It may be a thought that you don't even recognize. You start to panic, you start to worry about what's happening either in your body, what mentally, physically. Once you start to worry or get anxiety about what's happening, you're actually making all of those physical symptoms worse. The reason being is that anxiety creates more physical symptoms in the body and more fear. So this one technique that I'm going to teach you can help you end anxiety and panic attacks for good. It's going to sound very counterintuitive and it may not be super easy to do at first, but with time it will definitely help. So what I want you to do is start practicing an exposure technique by telling yourself, yep, I'm going to have an anxiety attack today or this week. Now this seems very counterintuitive to tell ourselves that something bad is going to happen, but when we're afraid of something happening, we're actually creating more of an anxiety response in the brain. And the brain is more hyper vigilant to the things that you feel when it does happen. So if you start to feel a racing heart, if you start to feel shortness of breath, if you start to feel a little bit off, you're going to find that you start to get more anxious about that and, and then all of these thoughts and feelings start to rev up even more and more often, creating an anxiety attack. When we're no longer afraid of the thoughts or the feelings, even the physical feelings that we get during these moments, it's not going to escalate. It's our reaction to it that escalates it to that point. This is all about anxiety and fear in the brain. And the less afraid of it we are, the less likely it is to happen. I've used these techniques to overcome anxiety and OCD in my life and I've never seen them not work. So you're going to continue throughout the days to tell yourself, yep, maybe I'll have an anxiety attack. Yep, maybe that thing will happen again. Yep, it probably will. And again, this is going to feel counterintuitive, but what it does is it's telling your brain that, that you're okay with it, even though you don't feel like you are, that you can handle it, that you're no longer afraid of it. And what's going to happen is your brain's going to stop being afraid of it. It's going to stop hyper focusing and looking for these feelings that you might start to get. Where if you get those feelings, it's going to judge them less harshly because you're no longer afraid of them. Now, as you're doing this, when you're feeling okay, what do you do when you're not? When you start to feel those feelings of being off or anxious, or feelings in your body that start to tell you that something is happening, panic about it again. If you get caught up in the thoughts, you bring yourself back to the present moment, focusing on your breath and saying, yes, I'm anxious. Yep, I feel off right now. I can handle this. This is just a feeling. It's just a sensation in my body. I can handle this. And the more you use these techniques, you're going to notice that if you get into an anxious moment, you're not going to spiral like you normally do. The anxiety that you feel in those moments as you practice acceptance and allowing them to be there, it's going to fade quicker. The more you do this, the less you're going to even be in those moments of anxiety and panic. Because you're teaching your brain that you can handle it when your heart races or when you have an anxious thought, or when there's uncertainty in life or you don't feel quite right. I want you to practice this a lot. Let me know how it goes. Again, it's not an overnight tool. This takes practice and time to retrain your brain that it doesn't have to be afraid of the thoughts or the feelings that you're experiencing. Let me know how this goes and we'll talk to you soon.
