How To Stop Panic Attacks And Obsessive Thoughts
Posted on August 12th, 2010 by admin
Obsessive thoughts are the real cause of almost all your anxiety. Every single time you’ve had severe anxiety it started with an obsessive thought, and it spiralled out of control and eventually became the severe anxiety you felt or the panic attack you had.
You might be thinking that this isn’t how anxiety works with you and that obsessive thoughts aren’t to blame, and if that’s the situation I’d like you to start paying attention to your own anxiety and to what you’re feeling and thinking right before it gets out of hand.
I think you’ll be amazed to learn that obsessive thoughts are at the heart of your panic and anxiety. The reason I’m so sure about this is because I’ve interacted with literally hundreds of people who are in exactly your position, plus I also experienced these same problems for myself for almost two decades.
The really terrible thing about having an anxiety disorder is that you can’t just shut off your bad thoughts like a lot of non-anxious people can. So you need a different option. And that option is to find ways to bring an instant halt to a potentially harmful thought before it ever has a chance to become an obsession.
I have a 3 step plan you can start using right now to prevent all your obsessive thoughts:
Step One is to retrain your thinking, ASAP. You need to get it to a place where it can spot a negative or potentially damaging thought the moment that it starts. This includes thoughts that start out very tiny and seem to be no problem at all. These small thoughts can grow into huge ones that cause serious problems, so these need to be treated just as the obviously terrible thoughts are treated.
Step two is to learn a technique that will allow you to stop these unwanted thoughts, and the one I suggest is to simply use other thoughts to overpower the original one. This makes sense, because the only thing that can ever stop one thought is another thought. The key here is to make this second thought a positive one. Play around with thoughts – use anything that works and overpowers that original and unwanted thought.
Third Step: Your damaging thoughts usually begin when your mind is left to wander, or to daydream. This is how thinking these bad thoughts becomes a habit. By thinking these thoughts too often they start to happen on their own, and they creep up on you and do their damage. To end this problem, there’s only one answer: creating a new default frame of mind, one that’s calm, positive, and pleasant. You do this by thinking good, positive thoughts as often as you can, so that this becomes the type of thinking your brain does automatically when you aren’t paying attention.
Use these 3 steps to quickly put a stop to your obsessive thoughts and your panic attacks.