Need Information on Anxiety Attacks? by Michael Logan

If you or someone you care about is suffering with anxiety attacks, information that can help them and you as you support them is available. Most people would say that anxiety is only a feeling and nothing more. While it's true it is a feeling, there's a bit more to it than that.

Anxiety is what we experience when we feel stressed. Anxiety isn't a bad emotion. We can feel this way when we have a flat tire and need to get it fixed. We can get anxious when we know we have to go to the dentist and we can have anxiety when we need to get to work and we're end up getting stuck behind rush hour morning traffic.

So when does anxiety become something that we have to face and deal with? When we reach the point where the fear becomes overwhelming, possibly irrational, and leaves us unable to function. More often than not, anxiety goes hand in hand with a physical reaction.

Anxiety shows up and we feel it in our body. Emergency rooms all across America have experienced patients rushing in to be seen thinking they were having a heart attack only to be told it was a panic attack instead. A panic attack is another term for when we feel an attack of anxiety. The concern of the patient is correct because it can mimic a heart attack. The chest pains can be accompanied by shortness of breath, sweating and a fast, pounding heartbeat.

When you live with anxiety attacks, information on how to deal with them can be beneficial to your mental and physical health. When you feel dread in the knot of your stomach, take a moment to consider why you feel that dread. Can you pinpoint a reason?

If you can't find a reason, you may be having a panic attack. Does this mean you're crazy? No, not at all. There are millions of people who have problems with anxiety and the struggle isn't limited by race, religion or economic status. People from all walks of life experience these kinds of problems with anxiety - including doctors!

Not seeking help is a mistake. Untreated anxiety can lead to deeper struggles mentally, emotionally and even physically. Anxiety is a condition, it's not a way of life and you don't have to live in it. There is treatment and healing that can help you learn how to handle life with these episodes. They don't have to escalate into something bigger than you can handle.

Finding anxiety attacks information can lead to recovery. You can have a life where fear doesn't rule you. You can learn how to have normal responses to stress. The challenges of anxiety don't have to put you on the sidelines. You can be cured.

So what is the cure? There are three things we human beings can manage, our thinking, our feelings, and how our body moves, or our behavior.

The one thing that I do not hear the experts talk about is how fast my Central Nervous System can bring on a feeling of anxiety. If my car starts to make some unexpected noise or leave a leak on the driveway, I will have the chemistry of anxiety about twice as fast as I can blink my eyes, and if I have not practiced an antidote, it might take me 20 minutes to clear that chemistry from my body. If I am good at my antidote, I might clear the anxiety chemistry from my body in the next 1/18th second, and clearing the anxiety is the first part of the anxiety attack information that I need to know.

Once my body is relaxed again, I can get on to the problem of the car repair with a brain that will be capable of using its higher perceptual centers.

So what tools are helpful anxiety attack antidotes? Well, I like what the AA folks have always suggested, Daily Prayer and Meditation, because when one regularly practices some kind of spiritual activity, it is easy to resort to that tool, for no other reason than to calm down.

And with practice of a mindfulness or meditative or prayerful tool comes the experience that you can stay prayerful and mindful a good deal of time, which is a wonderful anxiety antidote.

However if you are from the West, you may want a tool that involves technology, like a biofeedback tool, and do I have just the one for you.

The emWave is a heart rate variabilty biofeedback tool which will actually guide you through a process of learning to manage the time between heart beats using a computer.

It took me about six one half hour practices to be confident that my cue thought and breathing pattern would actually make the inside of my body relax.

I wanted some kind of outside proof, like an image on a computer screen, because I am very good at fooling myself about my progress with a tool.

So now I use this heart rate variability biofeedback tool with many of my anger management and domestic violence clients and have for almost 11 years.

Learning this kind of biofeedback has provided me with that anxiety attack antidote that I never had. I cannot count how many times I have done my heart rate variability biofeedback, mostly just because I like to feel good.

So any article about anxiety attacks information should include mention of effective antidotes, and those antidotes can range from the ancient meditative traditions to the new, western biofeedback machines. I suggest creating an amalgam of both. Good luck to you.