Self- Management to Control Panic Attacks

Identify Unhealthy Behaviors

Face the challenges that cause you to experience feelings of panic.

You are now going to identify unhealthy behaviors which you exhibit when you panic and then your next goal is to challenge those behaviors that make you feel uneasy. Self-management is different from many other procedures because you will learn to take responsibility for the way you respond to feelings of panic. You will learn to build yourself an armory of self-management techniques to help you cope with unforeseen events and circumstances without panic attacks.

In order for you to receive any benefits from self-management techniques in order to overcome panic attacks, you must use some strategies consistently and daily:

• - You will need to write down and monitor your behavior for one week. Your goal is to establish a standard of value, i.e. a baseline to which other similar behaviors can be compared to the problem behavior. You will be asked to measure your current level of panic and behavior before you implement self-management techniques.
  
  
• - Use your self-monitoring skills. Your goal now is to either to keep your stress levels at your baseline without stressors or to reduce it still further. Keep up this self-monitoring for 14 days. Make a contract with yourself to encourage your progress.

Identify Unhealthy Behaviors

Describe one of your unhelpful behaviors which result from stress that you would like to reduce – e.g. perhaps you overeat when you feel panicky or you act out of impulses.
Write down the situation surrounding the behavior and the events that lead to the behavior. Review the consequences that result from that behavior.
Step 2: Alter the Situation: The next step is to alter the situation. Alter what leads up to the unhealthy behavior to change the targeted behavior.
Look back at your self management skills that you used to control the objective behavior.

Make friends with yourself. Instead of being your own enemy, learn to like the good points about you.

Now all that is left is for you to create a plan to put your new behavior into action and sustain it or to make it even better. Stick with your plans and carry on creating goals you can achieve in overcoming panic attacks.