Meditation And Exposure Therapy as Treatments For Anxiety Attacks
There are many possible treatments for anxiety attacks. There are natural solutions, substances, physical treatments, and mental treatments. Today we’ll be going over two treatments whose central focus is on mental discipline.
The first treatment to address is exposure therapy. It is a group of strategies used under Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). It is based on the idea that human beings can adapt to anything when exposed to it enough times. By controlling the exposures constructively, that adaptation can serve to help you get over your fears and end your anxiety attacks.
There are a few different types of exposures for the purposes of this discussion. Each will help to strengthen you against certain stimuli.
The direct approach is often weakened or introduced gradually. Should you feel that a particular situation leads to anxiety attacks, you will be exposed to smaller pieces of that stress until you gain the ability to handle them calmly. You will be exposed to more stressful situations as you gain the ability to deal with them. This will continue until the problem is gone.
There is also the imagined exposure in which you will visualize yourself dealing successfully with a stress. You will become more confident as you do this repeatedly so you can better deal with the stress when you must face it for real. Visualizations also serve to guide your subconscious, as only your conscious mind is able to distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined.
Physical exposure is the last one. It works well if the physical reactions to the anxiety attack cause you a great deal of stress. This is merely a simulation of the feared symptom in a controlled environment until the fear dissipates.
The next treatment to address today is meditation. It can be very useful in strengthening your mind to better deal with stresses when they do pop up. You can’t expose yourself to every situation, so this is greatly beneficial. If you’re exposed to a new stress, your mind will still go wild if you don’t gain some form of mental discipline.
There are hundreds of forms of meditation as there are so many subjects you can focus on. The imagined exposure is actually a form of meditation. Another one I recommend for anxiety attack sufferers is where you practice clearing your mind. Rarely does the person having the anxiety attack know how to deal with the thoughts that flood their mind constructively. Adding more uncontrolled energy to the mix like that is just fuel for the fire.
That is why meditation can be so beneficial. To meditate in this style, relax your body and focus on your breathing. This approach works well for a few reasons. Your body will feel calmer when you take deep breaths and function better. Since it is fairly uncommon to think about your breathing, it will be easy to stop thinking about it at some point. Inevitably, thoughts will come up, but don’t engage them.
It will take practice to master this, but keep with it. When you become better in this skill, you may apply it to let go of stresses that enter your life daily. If you stop the stress early enough, it won’t lead to an anxiety attack. This isn’t to say that you can’t benefit from trying to apply the technique during an attack, but ideally it should never get that far.
