Simple trick to beat the agony of CRIPPLING anxiety

Thousands of us experience panic attacks. But you CAN stop them, says a new book — by learning how to rewire your brain . . .

unpleasant feelings you perceive as soon as you are aware of anxiety welling up. Perhaps dizziness, a tingling in your arms and legs, tightness in your chest or a lump in your throat. In order to cancel these physical symptoms, you need to use a counter method in each case.

Here are some examples for the most common symptoms:

CANCEL left/right dizziness with imagined dizziness back and forth. Cancel back/ forth dizziness with imagined dizziness left to right. Cancel an anticlockwise spinning sensation with imagined clockwise dizziness. And you can cancel a clockwise spinning sensation with imagined anticlockwise dizziness.

IF YOU feel that the ground beneath your feet is giving way, picture the following: everywhere in t he ground are hydraulic lifts. As soon as one of your feet touches the ground, they lift it up.

STOP the ‘ ants’ moving up your arm by imagining ants moving down your arm ( or vice-versa).

IF YOU feel heat rising in your body, imagine you are standing beneath an ice-cold shower and the water is flowing over your body and taking the heat with it.

IF YOUR throat feels tight, like you’re wearing a weighty collar, imagine there is a cool, smooth steel pipe in your throat that is slowly expanding and counteracting the collar: the collar starts to split, then fall off.

TIGHTNESS in your chest is often described as a belt around your chest. Imagine you have mechanical ribs of steel that you can use to expand at the press of a button to burst the belt.

LIKEWISE, if your panicinducing visualisation is sped up, imagine it in slow motion. If the voice in your head is deep and threatening, imagine it as squeaky and inoffensive, and so on.

Escaping panic attacks begins with questioning your thought processes and then, invigorated by the first successes of a new way of thinking, tackling the life changes that need to be made, bit by bit. It’s as simple as that.

ADAPTED by Felicia Bromfield from The Anxiety Cure: Live A Life Free From Panic In Just A Few Weeks by Klaus Bernhardt, published by Vermilion at €14.© Klaus Bernhardt