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In this edition of Oasis of Calm I offer you an insight to panic which will change your reaction to it and
immediately start you on the path from panic to calm.
That insight is beautifully simple.
Some people sell that insight as an e-book, or a course in conquering panic and anxiety. They sell it for $47US or $97US and even
$149US.
I’m happy to share it with you for no charge at all.
I’m even happier to tell you that it isn’t something unique to me.
Unlike the author of The Linden Method, I don’t claim to have discovered THE CURE for panic and other anxiety states. I don’t
even claim that in my self-help kit Calming Words you’re going to find new and original insights.
The fact is that although that’s the claim that might make you buy my product, I’d rather tell you the truth.
Accept your symptoms and they’ll go.
And the truth is that over thirty years ago, an Australian General Practitioner (GP) Claire Weekes, gave that insight to many
hundreds of thousands of people through her books, recordings and through the self-help groups she established.
With acknowledgement to her caring and compassionate work, let me pass on that insight. Dr Weekes advised people who experienced
episodes of panic to do what must have seemed to them a very strange thing.
She advised them to do the opposite of what they’d been doing.
She advised that they float into their panic. That instead of fighting and resisting it, they should welcome it like an old
friend coming to visit.
Dr Weekes explained that people who experience those terrifying symptoms feel quite overwhelmed even though they know, at a
rational level, that there’s nothing to fear. In fact, for many people that’s the most upsetting aspect, the fact that they can’t explain why
they feel so terrified. They know that there’s no fierce tiger ready to pounce out at them.
She explained that once you accept that there was no real danger, then all you really fear is the feelings of fear itself. If you
could just let the inappropriate messages of fear come and do their worst, you’d learn how to send those fears packing.
The insight which will set you on the path to calm.
No resistance.
Think about that for a minute.
When you feel those symptoms of fear, panic, even terror, your normal (and totally understandable) response is to panic even
more.
You think: “Oh no. What if this episode is the one in which I do really lose it?
‘It’ being control over some indeterminate situation. You might have been thinking that you’ll lose control and
vomit, or lose control and faint, or just pass out with a heart attack, or all of the above.
Mimic Mother Nature – flow with the hurricane
In essence, Dr Weekes’s advice was to mimic Mother Nature.
Accept.
Offer no resistance.
Just as the grass and the trees sway with the wind, rather than rigidly resist it, she advised people to let their fear feelings
come. And then, her advice was to just observe what happens without offering any resistance to those feelings.
That seems, and is, counter intuitive. By that I mean that it’s asking you to do the very opposite to what you’d normally think
of doing. The opposite of what you’ve been doing for months, years, or even decades.
Just to be clear about this, Dr Weekes was not saying: “here are some ways to cope with anxiety and panic.” Nor was she
claiming that this is THE way to cure it. She was speaking and writing the simple truth. The way to escape fear is to float with it. Finding a cure,
in the sense of never having those symptoms again, that wasn’t an issue for her.
No. What Dr Weekes gave to the world was a way to react to anxiety whenever it comes into our lives. And it will come, unbidden,
for all sorts of reasons.
The lies of the snake oil salespeople
Yes, it’s seductive to think that there is a cure, one absolutely foolproof way to guarantee that you’ll never again have to
experience the feelings of intense fear that you hate so much.
And yes. Many products and courses offer THE CURE.
Part of the truth is that there is no one cure for panic, if by cure you mean finding a way to make sure you never, ever, feel
inappropriately anxious and terrified again. Another part of the truth is that we shouldn’t really be looking for a way to rid our lives of anxiety
and intense fears. They serve a life-saving purpose and without anxiety, we’d never move out of the path of real and present danger.
In my self-help kit Calming Words I don’t rehash information, call it
THE CURE and claim to be greatest provider of relief from anxiety and panic in the world. You can find that sort of stuff all over the Internet. I
offer you something much better: information about ALL the proven ways to beat anxiety panic and phobias from your life. I do that by building on
Claire Weekes’s insight into anxiety and panic – that it’s your reaction to your fear symptoms that’s the key to de-fusing it. In the
Calming Words program, I teach you how to change that reaction. I offer you information about many and
varied ways to bring more calm into your everyday life, whether you’ve ever had episodes of panic or not. In
Calming Words I offer you ways to think about your symptoms of fear so that when they come, you can accept them for what they are. Unwanted and
inappropriate surges of adrenaline – an automatic response when your body thinks you’re in danger.
With that simple insight, that acceptance is better than resistance, Dr Weekes and I are suggesting that you actually welcome
those symptoms of fear. By doing that, you extinguish its power. Next time you feel the first fluttering of fear and panic think to yourself:
“I know you. You’re nothing to panic about. Come on and do your worst. I know you can’t harm me. You’re just some throw back
to the days when I might have needed to run away from the sabre toothed tiger.”
It seems almost cruel to tell you but if you’ve been experiencing anxiety and panic for a while, I have to let you know that
you are the main reason that your fears stay with you.
Your fear of those fear-filled symptoms keeps that fear going.
The good news is that your anxiety, panic and phobias are only habits you’ve formed.
The habit, goes like this:
- Go to a situation in which you’ve felt out-of-the-blue panicky feelings.
- Anticipate that you’ll feel panicky again.
- Bingo, you do feel panicky again.
- Whenever you think about going to that place, you’ll feel the fear symptoms – just a bit of extra re-inforcement in case the fear goes away.
- Anticipate that you’ll feel panicky in that situation again.
- Feel panicky again.
I think you have the picture.
As with all habits, you can break that cycle, that habit, by simply letting the feelings come. Let them do their worst and just
watch them…evaporate.
You’re the major part of your problem. But you are also the total solution.
Dr Weekes saw it in the late 1960s. Others saw it too but didn’t put it into the same easy-to-follow compassionate advice that
characterised Dr Weekes' work. Details of her books are in my e-book and on my website, Calmingwords.com
on the Publications page.
To repeat, it’s not panic, and feelings of fear that are your problem. It’s your attitude, the way you think about and react to those symptoms of
fear.
Quite simply, you fear them. You panic about what will happen because your throat is dry, your heart is pounding and your stomach
is churning.
That’s it.
Instead of accepting that from time to time you might get those butterflies in the tummy, or you might feel your heart racing,
you go into The Panic Cycle.
Let’s go back to that idea of the link between your symptoms of fear and your reactions to those symptoms.
It’s all in the mind
If you feel terrified standing in that queue at the supermarket, or sitting in the middle of the row at the cinema, the feelings
you feel are fine.
Those feelings are a perfect reaction.
To danger.
The only problem is that there is no real danger in the Supermarket – apart from the ever increasing cost of goods.
Your mind has sent the wrong message “danger, danger” to your body. Your body has then had the right reaction.
The good news is: those messages can be rewritten, reversed, re-learned.
That’s one part of what you’ll learn in my Calming Words
self-help kit.
As part of the Calming Words program, you’ll re-write those
inappropriate messages – the ones that tell your body that you’re in danger in the supermarket, or at the movies, or shopping in the Mall. So that
you have to panic and look for a way out (flight). Or, you have to avoid those situations.
The paths to calm
The approach of welcoming your symptoms of fear, floating with those symptoms, not resisting them and even asking them to do
their worst; that is the best way to dis-arm panic and anxiety.
It’s absolutely unassailably true, that the opposite of panic is calm. You simply cannot panic and stay calm at the same time.
And nor can you stay calm and panic simultaneously.
It’s true that if you go with your feelings of panic, float with them, don’t add to them by fearing them, you’ll quickly find that your body’s
own calm response will kick in.
Some of you may know how to breathe deeply and bring on that calm response more effectively. Some of you know many diversionary
things to do to help you through an episode of intensely unpleasant fear-filled symptoms. You might count to 100 in Greek, or concentrate on a
painting on the wall, or do any number of things.
However, with all those things, you may still be fighting the symptoms of the fear. You might be fighting them by trying to get
rid of them with deep breaths or diverting thoughts.
What Dr Weekes and many other people have recognised is that if you float with the symptoms of fear, and just recognise that
that’s all they are – symptoms you don’t want and symptoms you don’t need – if you do that, your fear immediately subsides.
To eliminate the habit of panicking, you need to do something very simple. You must:
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Stop fearing the symptoms of fear.
That’s all they are. Symptoms caused by adrenaline.
Let your heart race. It’ll soon slow down if you let it.
Besides, you know it speeds up if you add more fear to it.
So be like the blades of grass in the hurricane. Accept.
Float with the feelings.
Tensing up, feeling more anxious, trying to escape are all ways of resisting.
Accept.
The opposite of panic is calm.
Accept your symptoms of panic, and you’ll find their opposite.
You’ll find calm. |
Dr R Reid Wilson a world authority on anxiety and panic
I’ve mentioned Dr Claire Weekes. Let me tell you about another international authority on the subject, R Reid Wilson PhD. Dr
Wilson is the Director of the Anxieties.com website. He is also Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry
at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He specialises in the treatment of anxiety, and he served as the lead psychologist for
American Airlines, designing the first national program for the fearful flier.
In his book Facing Panic: Self-Help for People with Panic Attacks Reid
Wilson sets out seven self-help steps. I recommend that you buy that book – it’s about $15US. This book is not available from Amazon, but is
exclusively available from Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA). Click to order from
ADAA. If you can’t afford it, ask your local Library to buy a copy. It is a very practical, user-friendly, set of strategies. In my opinion,
when you’re facing panic, sometimes you need to read the same thing in many different ways, from a number of sources before you really accept it.
That’s very true in relation to starting on your path from panic to calm.
The start, the first step on that path, is as beautifully simple as Claire Weekes’ advice given many decades ago.
Meditation will help you to manage your panic and anxiety
It might seem contradictory to tell you how important I think meditation is in your journey from panic to calm.
After all, I’ve told you the truth as many people know it.
Accept your symptoms. Don’t greet them with more fear and they’ll disappear.
That’s nothing new. It’s not THE CURE. I’m not marketing it to you as a discovery unique to me. I leave that sort of marketing
hype to others, many of whom may be well-intentioned.
I’ll review some of those other products in the next edition of Oasis of Calm.
I am suggesting that even if you’ve never felt great anxiety, and especially if you have, you need to replenish the stores of
calm within your being. Those stores of calm are constantly being depleted by our busy lives, by all the stimuli which bombard our senses by the
nano second.
We live in the information age. We also live in the age of information overload, and the age of stimulation overload.
I’m suggesting that it will be a lot easier for you to follow Dr Weekes’ advice if your body is constantly replenishing its
natural state of calm.
Meditation is now accepted by Western medicine as a proven way to do that.
I’ll write reports in future e-zines about its documented benefits. I’m not claiming, as some people do, that meditation is THE
CURE for anxiety. Or that it’s THE CURE for anything.
I’m saying that it’s a wonderful thing to do, whether or not you’ve ever felt an anxious moment.
I’m also saying that it’s pleasant.
It’s fun.
It’s a vital complement to your new approach to panic – that of welcoming it and observing it without resistance. You can do
everything better and with greater confidence when you’re working from a calm base.
Let me be even clearer. Daily meditation is great for everyone. And the following article is about a product that makes
meditation easy – even those of you who have tried it in the past but found it elusively difficult
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