Dr. Don Wood explains panic attacks as a loop where your brain misinterprets normal stress signals as danger. His strategy: prepare three positive thoughts beforehand, close your eyes during an attack to slow your brain, switch to one of those thoughts, then open your eyes and describe what you see to reorient yourself.
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Here's how you can stop having panic attacks. If you experience panic attacks, it's very important for you to understand why you have them. A panic attack is a combination of psychological and physical. Something is your mind is bothered by and it's going over and over and over it. You may not even be aware of it. It may be below your conscious awareness. Here's what happens, though. If your mind is feeling that bit of stress that even that you're not even aware of, it will then start to create a physiological response. You may start burning some oxygen and you may start speeding up your lungs a little bit, but you're not aware of that consciously. So now your body sends a message to the brain that we're running low on oxygen. The brain that was already looking for some danger and can't find it gets more confirmation from this physical loop that something's wrong. Then the brain will interpret, there's maybe a bigger threat, start to speed up the lungs. So what's happening is your mind is looking, in essence for the lion. They can't find the lion because the lion doesn't exist. There is no lion. So what do you do? The mind goes into panic. I've seen people have panic attacks for 30 and even 45 years, assuming it's just something they have to live with. That is not true. One of the things that I always share with people who experience that is to have three positive things that are going on in your life. A vacation that's coming up. Maybe you're going to go watch your child perform in a play. Have those three thoughts prepared in advance. The reason I always want you to do it in advance is because it's very hard to do it when you're in the middle of a panic attack. And when you start to experience a panic attack, immediately close your eyes. And when you close your eyes, you shut the brain down, you slow it down, and then what do you do? So now you're going to shift gears into one of the positive thoughts. Then open up your eyes and look at the first thing you see and just quickly describe it in your mind. What that does is it brings you back into the present. By coming back into the present, that should help start calming it down.
