How To Stop Panic Attacks – The No. 1 Way

Copyright (c) 2009 Riley West

The following narrative is me trying to tell you how to stop panic attacks in the best way I can and that story is the tale of how I did it for myself.

This all happened to me in the first half of the 80’s. There was no internet and just barely any computers. I found my information in the bookstores and libraries.

I read what I could find about panic attacks but I never did find a method by which a person could get rid of these horrible things.

But I found a way.

I had it bad. I always had elevated anxieties and I coped with them to the best of my ability. They got in the way of my life in a few ways that weren’t too disruptive.

Until the panic attacks hit. Like happens to so many, they seemed to come out of nowhere. To make things worse, the panic attacks exacerbated my anxieties.

I lived with these volcanic disruptions for over five years and how to stop panic attacks was on my mind daily. I had one to two, sometimes three, attacks per week. They differed in strength from intense to horribly intense.

My attacks were set off by business meetings, public speaking, and talks with doctors in small rooms. I was a businessman and had plenty of opportunity to try to learn how to cope with panic in public places.

And cope I did. I think I coped as well as I could. So far, nothing I did could make them go away and stay away.

I remember one day I was driving in my car and. not surprisingly I was reflecting back on the attacks.

I realized that I had gone through many hundreds of these pernicious, evil episodes and that it seemed like they had all come and gone with no damage to me that I could see. Physically at least, mentally I wasn’t so sure.

I had some ego damage, I suspected that I was at least a little crazy, and I surely had diminished reputation with some people. But no big harm.

Then I started to recall all the wasted time and lost business opportunities and general mayhem these attacks inserted into my life and my “anger meter” started to rise.

Right then, in that car, on my way to a dreaded business meeting, I became angry and determined to throw these things out of my life!

That determination, and the realization that these attacks couldn’t hurt me, enabled me to lose my fear of them. Incredibly, I was actually anxious for one to arrive.

It felt as good as the time I beat up the high school bully.

While I was stopped at a traffic light, just before going into my meeting, the feelings that usually announced the start of an attack, rose up in my stomach.

I sat there, behind the wheel, and pictured that attack in my mind. I saw it as an “evil entity” and I wasn’t afraid. I felt strong and determined.

I shouted in the car, supposedly to the “attacking entity” something like this. “You are through here. I’m not afraid, you have no power, get out and don’t come back.”

I felt the weak hold that nascent attack had on me loosen and slip away. I knew it wouldn’t be back. If it tried I would just do the same thing and throw it out.

I had come to a new way of thinking about these things that enabled me to shed my fear of the attacks and, once that was done, they never came back.

That’s it. The “fear” of the attacks was the key to getting rid of them!