Anxiety is, alongside with Schizophrenia, one of the most common mental disorder of our days.
That is why, in this article, we will try to address those who suffer from this illness, hoping to offer them not a substitute for psychiatric treatment and definitely not a replacement for qualified psychotherapy, but only a guide to the process of curing anxiety.
This attempt of ours is comparable to giving a traveler his map: it will not replace the means of transport, nor his own effort, yet it will ease his access to knowledge and destination.
And, as far as anxiety is concerned, knowledge is the key-word.
Many of us have experienced fear, some of us even in the utmost form of it, terror.
The instinctive response to this kind of feeling is to attack, or runs from the object of our fear.
But what do we do when fear has no object at all? When all we can experience is the tearing emotion, but we are deprived of the soothing mental process of identifying the menace and coming to a solution for its removal? The answer, as mentioned above, is knowledge.
There is not, indeed, an exterior fact to know, but what we can certainly know is the process by which the anxiety attack occurs.
We, then, can do with our own psyche what programmers call backtracking: re-program everything in reverse order, trying to get to the core of our problem.
A simple and understandable explanation for anxiety attacks, apart from each individual's personal history and background, is a lack of concentration upon our own way of breathing.
In stressful situations we have the tendency to breathe faster, thus increasing the heartbeat rhythm.
During the anxiety attack, we will firstly associate these reactions with their common source: fear.
We will unconsciously tell ourselves: I am afraid.
And we will start to believe that, not noticing that we have nothing to be afraid of until it is apparently too late, and we have entered some sort of a spiral of terror: the more we concentrate upon it, the more its intensity grows.
Right about now, we do actually have an object to be afraid of: fear itself.
The first thing you do when you experience an attack should be to relax, take a hold of your own breathing rhythm.
No one died because of something like this, so you wonâ¬"t die either, even though you feel like you would.
Usually there is no qualified psychologist around to tell you what you should think, and no one around you really understands what is happening to you.
If people panic, try not to do the same.
This is not a dark joke, panic is indeed your problem already, but you can isolate your thoughts and try to force rationality to kick in: nothing bad actually happened, and you should come, in the end, to that conclusion.
After a while, it should all be gone.
It is important that after the attack you should see a psychiatrist and also, it is important not to give in to the idea that you have an illness if you do so.
Try to socialize, go to work, be active.
There are good anxiolytics on the market, the doctor will prescribe you one according to your needs.
Yet, these drugs are made only to help you, not to replace your effort in the process.
You lost control somewhere, and you must regain it.
Look for advice.
Learn about your situation.
Know.