Cognitive Therapy Basics

Natural treatment for panic disorder works best to get rid of symptoms for good.

Medications can help the symptoms of an acute attack, and can reduce the likelihood of an attack happening, but will not cure the condition.They may control the symptoms enough so that natural methods can be used effectively.

Panic attacks are caused by an over-activation of the body’s natural “fight or flight” response to danger. They become more troublesome as the sufferer begins to perceive more and more places, situations, thoughts or items as “dangerous” because an attack is likely to happen and the whole situation can become a downward spiral of cause and effect, which is called panic disorder. As a result a sufferer will try to avoid situations that are likely to provoke an attack, and be chronically anxious about having to come in contact with something that causes panic. This is called avoidance behavior and can lead to agoraphobia.

Natural treatment for panic disorder falls into 2 main groups:

*Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT

This is one of the most effective forms of therapy. It involves therapy sessions with a psychologist who will help a sufferer understand what conscious thoughts are likely to trigger a panic attack. Therapy will aim at changing the thought process so that the trigger is no longer a threat.

* Exposure Therapy

Again this involves several sessions with a therapist who will gradually expose a sufferer to a panic trigger in a controlled way. With each exposure the panic response should be small enough to handle and will gradually reduce as exposure becomes more frequent and prolonged.

Natural treatment for panic disorder and chronic anxiety involves focusing on the actual triggers of a sufferer’s panic. This may include, train travel, driving, shops, even walking down the street. Once the usual triggers are identified, a therapist can use one of two usual methods of eliminating the panic. One is cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, and the other is a sub-group of CBT called Exposure Therapy.

Exposure therapy uses the principle of habituation. If you live in a house on a busy street, the chances are that you no longer hear the traffic outside. But if a friend came to stay for a few days, he or she might have trouble sleeping because of the noise. You have become habituated to the noise, but they have not.

In the same way a panic attack sufferer can be habituated to the triggers of the panic. This could be a situation, a thought, or an item and the therapist would, through a series of meetings, gradually dispel the fears that are associated with that trigger.

The technique involves gradual, repeated and eventually prolonged exposure to the trigger. Each exposure should be just enough to bring on a little of the underlying anxiety, but not so much that a full-blown panic attack undermines the good of the session. With each session of managing to cope with a little more of the trigger, self-confidence increases and fear reduces. It is important to have regular contact with the trigger and a therapist would plan to see you often but will set assignments between sessions in order to keep up your exposure.

At the end of therapy, prolonged exposure to the full trigger should be possible, with no symptoms of panic.

Natural treatment for panic disorder very often involves cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. This is a method where a therapist will help you explore what the main triggers for your anxiety and panic are, and work through the thought processes that go on to make this cause a panic attack.

For any trigger that causes a panic attack there is a thought or series of thoughts over which we have some control. This is the cognitive bit.  For someone whose trigger is driving in the car this might be: “If I get in the car and drive something awful will happen.”

This is linked to resulting emotions – how these thought make you feel, for example nervous, uptight, scared.

Linked to both these other areas are the physical symptoms which normally include dizziness, nausea, palpitations, hyperventilation, tingling, chest pain, or knot in the stomach.

What a psychologist will do is help you to understand the relationship between all of these areas and their inter-dependence. In other words, making a deliberate change to way you think about a given situation will in turn change the emotional response and the subsequent physical symptoms.

In addition, a therapist will talk through the situation to get in perspective what is likely to happen. So if we think that driving the car will result in something catastrophic, we can look at safety statistics, and talk about pulling over at the side of the road if there is any problem.

So, eventually the thought process changes to ” I have a license and I can drive perfectly well” and the emotional response starts to become less extreme. As a result the chance of actually having a panic attack while driving the car is markedly reduced.