What Causes Anxiety Attacks?

Panic attacks and anxiety attacks occur when your thoughts get out of control. You may or may not be aware of the negative, mean, obsessive thoughts that you are thinking but they are there in your brain.

When your negative thoughts attack you, your nervous system gets very upset. This happens even if you are not aware of your negative thoughts.

Dr. Jeanette Answers Questions about the Most Effective Anxiety Treatment

Natural Anxiety Help for Social Anxiety, Generalized Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Panic Attacks, ADD, ADHD

Anxiety Treatment Question

“My life is ruined with anxiety attacks and panic attacks. Is there any hope for me? I have tightness in the chest with anxiety and cannot breathe. Drugs do not help.” Lisa in Australia

Natural Anxiety Treatment Answer

First, let me congratulate you on being aware of your anxiety. Unfortunately, most people live in denial about how anxious they are. Millions of people do not know they are anxious even though their foot is jumping up and down. Or they are biting their nails while driving the car.

Feel hopeful and glad that you are not in denial. This means you can definitely overcome anxiety attacks and panic attacks naturally.

Let’s Review Anxiety Attack Symptoms

1. Tightness in the chest, heart pounding
2. Upset guts, flipping stomach
3. Hyperventilating
4. Cannot seem to catch your breath
5. Thinking something terrible is going to happen
6. Racing thoughts of disaster
7. Cannot perform the task you need to perform

If you have any of the above you are having an anxiety attack or panic attack. Anxiety attacks and panic attacks are similar.

A panic attack has a higher pitch than an anxiety attack. In both situations, you are overwhelmed. This means you are not present, relaxed and self-confident.

What Causes Anxiety Attacks?

Panic attacks and anxiety attacks occur when your thoughts get out of control. You may or may not be aware of the negative, mean, obsessive thoughts that you are thinking but they are there in your brain.

When your negative thoughts attack you, your nervous system gets very upset. This happens even if you are not aware of your negative thoughts.

Your attacking mental thoughts cause your anxiety symptoms to occur.

When you get caught up in your out of control mental energy you become overwhelmed by the energy of your thoughts. You can become so overwhelmed you are completely paralyzed. This is when you panic.

Current Anxiety Treatments

Medication

Drugs do not cure anxiety. Medication masks your anxiety problem. Drugs keep you from reducing your anxiety unless you deliberately use the medication with a therapeutic, desensitization plan to reduce your anxiety.

Legal anxiety medications are harmful to your body and should only be used in conjunction with an anxiety reduction program. Make sure you are in an anxiety reduction program with an experienced holistic psychologist who knows how to desensitize you to what makes you anxious.

Systematic Desensitization for Natural Anxiety Treatment

In the old days, during my post doctoral training at the Behavior Therapy Unit at Temple Medical School in the 1970’s with Joe Wolpe, MD, we used systematic desensitization to treat anxiety.

With systematic desensitization we taught people to relax their body and then imagine the things they were afraid of in small steps until they were no longer afraid.

Systematic desensitization is very effective in reducing anxiety attacks, panic attacks, PTSD, phobias, stress anxiety, social anxiety and GAD symptoms.

Systematic desensitization is still the treatment of choice for anxiety, anxiety attacks and panic attacks.

Learning research proves that anxiety is a learned behavior. This means, if you learned something, you can unlearn it.

Therefore:

1. You do not have to live with anxiety for the rest of your life.

2. You can learn how to reduce and eliminate anxiety attacks.

Use desensitization. For example, if you have a fear of driving across a bridge based on a past experience that really happened to you, use systematic desensitization to get rid of your anxiety.

A stimulus specific desensitization program for anxiety is very effective.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Anxiety Treatment

The most popular current treatment for anxiety is Cognitive Behavior Therapy. CBT teaches you to think positive thoughts.

Having to think, about thinking positive thoughts, is probably the reason Cognitive Behavior Therapy has a high recidivism rate according to the last study I read. Recidivism, means the anxiety returns after the anxiety treatment.

Another reason Cognitive Behavior Therapy is limited is you obsess about positive thoughts in the exact same way you obsess about negative thoughts. Obsessing is the problem. Thinking is the problem.

You want to move beyond thinking to get out of your beta brainwaves. You access much more of your human potential when you overcome anxiety. You enjoy peak experiences.

Meditation and Mindfulness for Anxiety Treatment

Meditation and mindfulness are also used to treat anxiety with some degree of success. However, without a stimulus specific desensitization program you are not unlearning whatever makes you anxious.

In addition, meditation and mindfulness are the mind-trying-to-solve-its-own problem approach. As Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.”

This is absolutely correct when it comes to unlearning anxiety naturally. In order to unlearn your conditioning you must get out of your brain and the same consciousness that created your anxiety in the first place.

Yoga For Anxiety Treatment

EMDR is a simple technique that falls under the systematic desensitization program mentioned above. Dr. Wolpe recognized the value of EMDR as an effective tool before he died.

EMDR works to the degree that you are desensitizing your past memories and past conditioned responses so you unlearn them.

What is the Most Effective Anxiety Treatment?

Thinking positive thoughts is not enough. Talking about your anxiety is not enough. Relaxation Therapy is not even enough.

To be successful in reducing your anxiety you must unlearn the anxiety behaviors that you learned in the past.

To be self-confident you must get to the root cause of your anxiety and unlearn your anxious behaviors. Only then can you relax and enjoy life.

You must learn how to deal effectively with what makes you anxious and learn new ways to help yourself be effective.

EMDR For Anxiety Help

If yoga works for you, use it. Be glad it works and do not worry about it!

However, if yoga does not stop your anxiety, notice how during yoga, your brain tells your body to posture itself in a certain way. Therefore, your brain is still the dictator.

In addition, when you use yoga you are not unlearning any of your specific anxiety responses and anxiety behaviors.

Relaxation Therapy and yoga are both limited if you do not include a desensitization program that addresses your specific learned anxiety behaviors so you unlearn your conditioned responses.

Dr. Jeanette’s Original Approach

The anxiety treatment in this home study course is based on learning research AND includes the added benefits of body awareness, energy awareness and emotional expression.

Dr. Jeanette’s body based approach is dramatically different from a Cognitive Behavior Therapy approach or psychotherapy approach.

When you are in the middle of an anxiety attack, the first thing you need to do is stop hyperventilating.

Next, you need to stop thinking.

Instead, you need to get your awareness into your body so you relax your muscles and bones into the field of gravity.

During an anxiety attack, your awareness is in your head, thoughts and mind. This is the reason you are so upset, scared and irrational.

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