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Fear of panic attacks is nearly as debilitating as the attacks themselves! This type of fear induced avoidance can become so severe as to limit your entire life. It will have an effect on your personal life, your marriage, career, and so on. It will also have an impact on your social life. You need to tackle the panic attacks before they reach this stage. In extreme cases you may be unable to leave the house except when accompanied by someone, and then only for brief periods of time. Your fear of panic attacks will start to dominate your life. The precise pattern of the avoidance behaviour is determined mainly by your specific fears. For example if you fear that exercise may induce a heart attack you will avoid energetic physical activity such as sports. This type of avoidance behaviour is self perpetuating and self sustaining. You are now re-asserting to yourself that you fear panic attacks, and will have another attack if you are in any of the situations you have grown to fear. This fear of panic attacks in itself makes it more likely that you will indeed suffer an attack in those situations. There are two common threads of thought on the approaches for changing this type of behaviour. One is called 'flooding' and the other is called 'desensitization'. I do not recommend the 'flooding' approach; it requires you to throw yourself headlong into what you fear. The other approach requires that you take a steady and gradual approach to conquering your fear. An example of this for someone who fears taking physical activity would be phasing your approach over a few weeks, for example a short walk on day one, a slightly longer walk on day two an so on. Fear of panic attacks, and indeed actual panic attacks can be cured; it is just a case of finding the right approach for you. | |||
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