How to Cure Panic Disorder - Looking Backwards and Forwards

You feel a strong, inexplicable sense of terror. Your heart races, breathing rate accelerates, and you may variously feel chest pains, abdominal pains, nausea, a sense of unreality, dizziness, sweating, clammy hands, constricted breathing passages, tingling, and so on. Symptoms vary, and you may have one or two most troublesome ones. You are rushed to a hospital. If other things are ruled out, you may have had a panic attack. Perhaps it lasted ten or twenty minutes all told. Or more.

Your mind searches. Why? You become afraid of another attack. What if it strikes when I would be socially embarrassed, like in class or at work? Sure enough, another attack comes, and maybe you don't know why it came when and where it came. The attacks become your tyrannical bully. Again if other conditions have been ruled out (such as heart attacks or hypoglycemia), over time and repeated attacks you develop a panic disorder.

Is there a cure for panic disorder? By now, you may have been prescribed a drug to calm your nerves. Maybe that has helped take an edge off and made life more manageable. Or maybe you reacted negatively to one drug and had to be put on another. Or you have found that alcohol or a recreational drug seems to make life easier to handle.

And maybe for various reasons you are holding your own now, though if you have read this far, probably you are barely coping. The medical establishment will tell you there is no known cure for panic disorder, only ways to manage it. Granted there is no single "magic bullet" pill that works every time to bring a person from a state of panic susceptibility to normal non-susceptibility. But people have been cured in that sense. Or dramatically overcome their propensity. Not everybody, but a lot of people from all walks of life.

In part, varying causes of panic require varying treatments. In most successful cases, multiple approaches serves as the best cure. And in most cases generally, a limited number of treatments or treatment types proves sufficiently effective.

Drugs and alcohol may have their benefits. They usually also come at a price, especially when used long term. Long term, they can and often do become a problem in their own right. Some drugs, notably some recreational ones and even some prescription ones, can even exacerbate anxiety level when used. And on the flip side, withdrawal symptoms when going off some drugs or alcohol (or nicotine) can exacerbate anxiety symptoms.

Long term, more healthy choices are generally preferable where possible. One may need counseling concerning a past emotionally traumatic event such as a divorce when one was a vulnerable child or the death of a loved one. One may need to exercise better sleep habits, exercise physically on a regular basis, eat a proper diet, such as one devoid of the stimulant caffeine that may be lurking in a favorite carbonated beverage. Switch jobs or housing to the less stressful side as needed. Slow and deep breathing exercises may be especially important for panic sufferers with asthma. In other words, strengthen yourself so as to reduce the chances of being susceptible to panic attacks. And reduce things that may make your panic worse.

Of course in most cases, more is needed. Your brain is stuck in a heightened state of anxiety. You need it to become unstuck, and not just by treating symptoms and avoiding difficult circumstances. In relatively few cases, a physical solution may be the best treatment, like the removal of mold allergens from the house or stopping the illicit drugs (or whatever), but in most cases, behavioral treatment proves the more effective.

Certainly there are possible physical influences or causes to anxiety and panic. But in most panic disorder sufferers, the emotional and behavioral component is the more powerful. You may have learned fear in the womb when your mother felt fear. You may have developed a fear reaction in experiencing separation from a parent when young. You may have learned fear through a series of negative experiences over a period of years or decades. Or you may have experienced a particularly horrifying time, perhaps when you were more vulnerable to it, perhaps as the last straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.

If such kinds of emotional experiences dug the panic disorder hole, training one's brain to react differently can be a way of climbing back out. Or so goes a theory that has worked in practice. A few suggestions are in order.

First, try gratitude. It may seem a little thing, but the feeling of gratitude can be a powerful emotional replacement to fear. If gratitude is not an immediate magic bullet, remember that it took a while to dig the hole and it will take a while to fill it back in. Exercise gratitude, or in this case the feeling of gratitude for whatever you sincerely feel thankful for. Exercise gratitude regularly over a period of time. This may be one reason why some religious perspectives are helpful.

Second, get excited instead of fearful. People get through a roller coaster ride because they interpret the terrifying plunges and near-misses at high speed as exciting. This does not mean you should get excited about morbid thoughts. Rather, use the energy that could be channeled into panic instead as excitement, whether in analysing your symptoms or in some constructive diversion like a fast walk or rapid creative speech or writing--whatever works positively for you.

Third, face your symptoms of fear and fear-inducing circumstances. This does not mean throwing oneself in harm's way. It does mean the opposite of the avoidance behaviors that strengthen anxiety. This may be done best in the company of a skilled counselor, and it need not be accomplished all at once, but in steps. If this is not easy, it has proven effective. One of the best ways emotionally to approach a lion at close range is to yell, charge, and wave something (while maintaining one's sanity). Panic is a kind of lion.

Looking back, there have been causes to your panic attacks. Looking ahead, there are effective treatments and there is hope.


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The author is a long time health enthusiast interested in helping people overcome anxiety and panic attacks.