Secrets of Marriage Counseling, Clinical Depression Relief, and Stress Management

Apparently, my mom tells me, that everyone the Christmas sadness one time or two in their life.I always thought that it was impossible.I love Christmas. It is the holiday that I look forward to the most. But they’re right. I’ve got the Christmas blues. I am officially experiencing Christmas stress. I can’t face the idea of flocked garland.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I just feel so tired lately. I was planning on getting presents for all my list this week, but if I’m not in the right mood I just can’t go shopping.It’s my personal Christmas shopping principle to have “the right kind of cheer” whenever you shop because it will reflect a great deal with the gifts you choose. To make matters worse, Jim just told me that their boss liked the dinner party we gave a few months ago so much that they “sort of” invited themselves again tonight.Jim must have “forgotten” to tell me again last night.

On top of everything else like the gifts I still have left to buy, and the Christmas stress I have going on, I still have a dinner party to get ready. I need to switch into my Superwoman mode right now. There’s nothing going on. I’m just too tired. With my luck I’m going to come down with a cold.That would be hard on the children. People have come to expect the happy cheerful me at Christmas time. I don’t want to bring down the party.

Ugh. I truly don’t feel very good.Excuse me…. WHAT!? I’m officially out of my Christmas stress.

I just got the news that me and my husband are having a baby! Bring on the party! I guess the flocked garland might get hung this year.

Lots of people think that the stress of the Holidays comes from the Christmas rush, or that people stress out from the pressure of the season, like decoration, the Christmas turkey or ham, or picking out the perfect present to make family members happy. For some of us we aren’t so lucky as for our main source of stress to be what goes under the pre lit christmas tres, but a lot of other considerations. For physicians like me, the holiday stress doesn’t just disappear after Christmas day is over and the house is cleaned up. For doctors the holidays last 365 days a year, or really the holiday stress follows us everywhere.

Christmas is about giving, and changing lives. Doctors are forced to make life and death decisions on a daily basis on behalf of our patents. Physicians are supposed to give hope to their patients that they can recover. Doctors do everything in their power to make clients feel better, when when recovery is near impossible, we just do our best to help them accept their situation and make them make the best out of the time they have left.

That is what makes everyday of our life a Christmas celebration, and it is stressful enough in our part, especially is we will be witnessing the last breath of our clients. There are times, you can’t hold long by being strong in front of a dying patient, and what you can do is just to empathize, or better yet, get out of the room and keep the sorrow for yourself. That is very nerve-racking in my part. It’s true when I say that holiday stress can be very different when you’re a doctor, because you can’t run away from it, it becomes a part of everyday normal life. So this year when you’re sitting around the lighted christmas wreath just relax and think it could be worse.

Overcoming panic attacks is like learning to become skilled in understanding the ins and outs of climate, wind, storms and various other weather patterns. If it is a bright sunny day with clear blue skies and I haven’t yet heard the weather news, I can be caught off guard by the coming storm. Not so the weatherman. He has honed his skills at seeing the data on the screen and interpreting what it means. If I were shown the same data, the same computer displays, I wouldn’t know what it means. This is not a problem, though, because I don’t need to develop these skills. There are other ways for me to know what all those numbers mean: I just check the news on the web or the morning newscast.

Overcoming Panic Attacks Begins by Learning to Interpret the Thoughts and Feelings Displayed on the Screen of Your Mind

Knowing that a storm is coming is important because it allow you to make different decisions. “Mayby we should post-pone our camping weekend.” Or, “I’ve decided to not do yard work tomorrow, because a storm is coming.” If you are a person that doesn’t listen to the weather reports you may consider learning a different way of making those same decisions by checking the news first.

If you suffer from panic attacks over an extended period of time, then I already feel like I know you. How can this be? In my experience people suffering from panic attacks have a style of making decisions. I have a hunch that you oscillate between fearing panic attacks too much (panic about panic), or ignoring your fears entirely. I also suspect that you have had some life experiences where you have had to be strong for a prolonged period of time. This may have even happened before you were old enough to have such challenges. To cope with it all you rightly learned how to ignore your own feelings of distress and concern. All your energies were devoted just to getting through whatever is next.

The Emotional Intelligence Required to Overcome Panic Attacks Includes Self-Awareness

Overcoming panic attacks involves learning to read the dials and gauges of your thoughts and emotions and be discerning. It means learning about which of your fear sensations you need to roll with, which one’s are a signal to run for your life, and which ones require some scaled-down combination of each extreme. In a nutshell, the emotional intelligence required to overcome panic attacks involves self-awareness.

Overcoming Panic Attacks Requires You to Acquire a New Skill Set

Overcoming Panic Attacks involves learning skills to interpret the confusing data that is displayed on the screen of your own mind. It requires skills to notice and observe, to know which sensations and thoughts are significant and which are not. It requires learning how to see patterns of emotions, sensations, and images that help you guesstimate the future. Just like weather forecasting, predicting what’s coming with your emotions is an imperfect endeavor. But as imperfect as it is, it is still necessary. Overcoming panic attacks involves raising your emotional intelligence by acquiring the skills to read your internal gauges or the cues displayed in your thoughts. It means learning to discern the meaning of what it happening inside you as it relates to the present moment and knowing what to do next. Do you have to know a lot of psychology to do this? Not at all. You just need to know enough about each gauge to make wise decisions for yourself and not just for the people around you.

What Does Making Discerning Decisions Involve?

1. It means recognizing subtle physical sensations in your body without inflating them into a catastrophy.
2. It involves noticing the feelings of anxiety and making decisions about how to explain to yourself what is going on.
3. It means looking at the dials and gauges—the mental pictures, the feelings, the thoughts–and making a decisions about what they are telling you about reality. It means assessing for yourself what all this internal “data” means for the decisions at hand.
4. It has a concept of normal anxiety that can serve as an internal reference point. Normal anxiety isn’t always cool and calm. Realistic anxiety knows when to recognize when the hurricane is, in fact, on its way and then evacuate. Panic sufferers are frequently evacuating at the first site of one small, lonely cloud. The outstanding feature of normal anxiety is its calibration to the real factors of safety and danger in a particular situation. Note that the point here is not to feel good all the time. Rather it is to be more grounded and realistic.
5. Finally, discerning decisions are emotionally intelligent and self-aware. Wise decisions about danger involve going beyond interpreting the dials and gauges (e.g., feeling dizzy) to being decisive in a way that neither caters to your anxiety nor ignores it. When your heart is pounding, you can make a reasonably realistic decision about whether to avoid danger or say to yourself, “It’s okay…just chill, just breathe ….yes, it’s really scaring the __________ out of me…steady now…this happened before and you didn’t die.”

Tip: It’s usually best to acknowledge your fears even while you are calming yourself. This usually works better than trying to convince yourself that it’s not a big deal.

One way to distill all these principles is to think of yourself as moving through a process of becoming more honest about yourself, other people, and the exact amount of risk in situations. When your head is swirling with a thousand “What if” questions, you are most likely painting a more catastrophic picture for yourself than is warranted by the facts. Currently, I am working on a self-study course that gives people a set of steps to acquire these skills. It will offer a track to run on for people overcoming panic attacks. If you are on one of my mailing lists, you will be alerted when it’s available. If you have a particular question about overcoming panic attacks, I invite you to post it now in the comment box below. If it fits, I may be able to include an answer to your particular question in the upcoming course. Thanks for being a part of the Momentum Living community.

1. DO NOT GROW AS A PERSON. If you grow and mature, you might get a new perspective on choices you’ve made and how you’ve related to others. A practical way to avoid growth: Frequently say to yourself and others, “That’s just the way I am.”
2. ALWAYS BE DEFENSIVE. Never question your own behavior or motives in a serious way. Instead, make an accusation. It might take the attention off things in yourself that other people think you should face. When people question what you say, just say the same thing more loudly. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER stop and think about what people are really saying to you.
3. DO NOT READ Reading has been known to cause regrets, especially if you read books and articles about how to live life in a more satisfying way. Getting new insights about things can make you want more out of life.
4. DO NOT KEEP A JOURNAL. Keeping a journal has the danger of preparing your mind to be reflective. If you begin to reflect on your life you might start thinking of change and this can lead to growth which often causes regrets (See #1 above).
5. DO NOT TAKE THE FIRST STEP TOWARD A POSITIVE CHANGE. If it goes well, you may feel bad that you didn’t make the change sooner. NOTE: If you are having trouble with this one keep in mind that making yourself excessively busy will effectively mask your fear of change. Make yourself busy enough that you don’t have time to think about doing something new. People will understand.
6. DO NOT BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF. Use denial often, but deny that you use it. Honesty with yourself is the single leading cause of regrets today. Four out of five doctors agree.
7. DO NOT ASK FOR HELP. Don’t ask for directions; maintain family secrets; never admit that you don’t know what to do next. The main idea here is that getting help can provide new perspective on the challenge you are facing. This new perspective can make you wish that you had changed what you were doing sooner.

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My heart was racing and I felt sick. I couldn’t move…” This is a typical comment by someone describing a panic attack. Many people speak of panic attacks when they simply mean that they were startled, anxious, or afraid. But panic attacks actually have a clinical definition. A panic attack is generally defined by any four of thirteen symptoms that intensify and peak during a short period of time.  Because they feel absolutely horrible, people usually look for ways to get rid of them as soon as possible.  Overcoming panic attacks involves various steps.  However, to make use of them you must know whether or not the anxiety you are experiencing is, in fact, a panic attack.  Therefore, overcoming panic attacks involves understanding the definition of panic attacks.
If you wonder if you have ever experienced a panic attack take the following SELF-QUIZ:

For the following list, circle the bullets for each of the symptoms that you have experienced at the same time during a 10 to 30 minute period.

• Pounding heart, palpitations, or accelerated heart rate
• Excessive sweating
• Trembling or shaking
• Shortness of breath or the sensation of being smothered
• The feeling of choking
• Chest pain
• Nausea or upset stomach
• Feeling dizzy, lightheaded, unsteady
• Feeling that people and things around you are not real or the feeling that you are somehow outside of yourself
• Fear of ‘losing it’ or going crazy
• Fear of dying
• Numbness or tingling sensations
• Chills or hot flashes

Now count how many bullets you have circled. Any combination of four or more symptoms that peaks in a short period time is considered a panic attack by medical and mental health professionals.

What Causes Panic Attacks?

There can be medical reasons such as an over-active thyroid. Phobias can also lead to panic attacks. Traumatic experiences can also become a source of panic attacks. Sometimes people know what they are afraid of and the anxiety just consumes them. Many others are clueless about the source of their anxiety and panic.

When a person has a panic attack “out of the blue” there is usually an upsetting thought at the root of it, but the person has successfully convinced himself that nothing is really bothering him. Over the years I have seen a clear pattern in my practice: people who suffer from panic attacks are trying hard to avoid thinking about something that is very disturbing. It can be unresolved grief from years past. It can be extreme dissatisfaction with a job or relationship. It might be something cruel that was done to a person. Often a person whose style is to “stuff” things down, will subconsciously avoid thinking about what’s bothering him. If a person lacks awareness of what he or she is feeling and why, a panic attack can feel like it comes for no particular reason.

What Steps Should Panic Sufferers Take?

The first step is to recognize them for what they are. Panic attacks are real; it is not all in your head. A person suffering from panic attacks should not be told, “Just get over it.”

The second step is to reassure yourself that panic attacks are your body’s way to scream that something in your life needs to change.

Third, schedule a complete physical exam with a physician or nurse practitioner. Get a blood test and know your general state of health. It is important to rule out medical causes (for example, a thyroid condition).

Fourth, learn the techniques for taming a panic attack. One helpful resource for this is Denise F. Beckfield’s book Master Your Panic and Take Back Your Life.

The fifth step is to consult with a psychologist. For the majority of panic sufferers that I have treated, one appointment has been sufficient to identify the specific causes of the panic attacks. Many people can reduce or eliminate panic attacks within weeks if they understand what to do. Because of this it just doesn’t make sense to suffer with panic attacks without doing something about them. Even one evaluation session can help focus one’s efforts in the right direction.