WHAT IS ANXIETY?
(including generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, PTSD, OCD, agoraphobia, nervous illness, nerves, overwhelming stress, traumatic stress, and other anxiety disorders)
Panic attacks are a part of our body's fight, flight, or freeze response. They reach their peak within a matter of minutes, at which time they can be very uncomfortable and include some (or many) of the following Anxiety Sensations:
- Chest pain or discomfort
- Nausea or abdominal distress
- Feeling dizzy, unsteady, light-headed, or faint
- Chills or heat sensations
- Derealization (feelings of unreality) or depersonalization (being detached from oneself)
- Fear of losing it or “going crazy”
- Fear of dying
- Restlessness.
- General sense of dread.
- Feeling constantly "on edge"
- Difficulty concentrating.
- Irritability.
- Feelings of panic, fear, and uneasiness
- Problems sleeping
- Cold or sweaty hands and/or feet
- An inability to be still and calm
- Dry mouth
- Numbness or tingling in the hands or feet
- Muscle tension
- Palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate
- Sweating
- Trembling or shaking
- Feeling shortness of breath or smothering
- Feelings of choking
This is not a comprehensive list of the sensations that you may feel when panic arises from your anxiety or PTSD, simply a list of some common occurrences. Since anxiety impacts nearly all of the parts of our bodies, we may feel any number of different things when we are anxious.
If you are reading this and thinking, "that's me alright, but what do I do now?" Then you have come to the right place!
Step one is to start teaching your body to calm down and begin living a more mindful life. Other factors may include diet, lifestyle, movement for healing anxiety, and many more, which you will learn through our podcast, blog posts, and 1-on-1 coaching with any of our Anxiety Coaches.
Even better, all of our anxiety coaching sessions are done by phone or Zoom, so you can get help wherever you are!
What could be more convenient than online or phone anxiety coaching?
We often look for a process or magic cure that will "fix" our anxiety.
We try all sorts of stuff, like:
- hypnosis
- wearing magnets
- drugs
- consult a shaman
- check out eastern medicine
- herbs
- study zen
- try yoga
- art therapy
- find a guru
- eat a special diet
- drink medicinal teas
- give up caffeine
- cut our sugar intake
- go organic
- see a psychic
- find religion
- and just about anything else that someone, somewhere, claimed on the internet to help with their anxiety.
That is a pretty long list --right!?
Look, we're not putting any of that down—we've been there, too. In fact, several of those things are very helpful and good for you, but they don't take away your anxiety.
We have tried a bunch of that stuff. You'll even hear us recommend some of those things on the podcast as steps to help you out, but those are for more immediate and acute situations and for learning to calm down enough to get some perspective and begin to learn the truth about what you need to do...or NOT DO. The truth is, we need to learn to accept and surrender rather than fight and seek out something or someone to do it for us. Anyone who has recovered from anxiety will tell you, as soon as they stopped trying so hard, they started to feel better...and stopped caring so much when they didn't feel great!
Once we begin to let go and start "being" instead of always "doing" things begin to change. The reality is that the things on that list that help us the most actually lead us to acceptance and surrender.