I was in therapy for a year for depression and anxiety. The one thing I remember most of all of what my therapist told me, was when he said he would sometimes ask anxious patients who were afraid of new attacks if they would just try to trigger one in the safety of his office, with him right there.

What this usually would do is convince the patients that the anxiety attack couldn't kill them, and that the feeling wasn't in fact dangerous. Also, anxiety tends to come in waves. You get through one wave, it slacks off, then the next one may be even higher, but it too passes, and after a while you can't feel any worse. And then the attack passes. Because the brain can't keep up the feeling for long, you get too exhausted. That's when you let an attack happen.

Now when you fight it, and fear the attack, the feeling can come back again and again because thinking about it fuels it. It's like a depressed person ruminating on the bad thoughts, then they take up nearly your whole day, no wonder the feeling is strong!

This really helped me. It may not help anyone else, but give it a try!

Equinox, I know what you mean. I often try to resist the onslaught of adrenaline but it's futile and ineffective. I was out doing some exercise about a month ago and I started getting a panic attack while running. I decided not to resist it, but surrendered to the idea of dropping dead. It wasn't easy and my heart was racing as if I was sprinting, but after a few scary minutes, I recovered enough to finish my exercise. I have since noticed that doing longer and more intense exercise seems to help a lot but it's hard to overcome the initial fear.

Actually, I haven't experienced quite paralyzing anxiety attacks for a few weeks now and I suspect it has something to do with some recent changes I made.

Though I am very carb tolerant and can lose weight even on 100-120g a day, I dropped down to VLC (~30g) as an experiment because anxious people seem to have issues with the ups and downs of blood sugar. I eliminated all the low carb fruit I was eating which included a very small portion of berries, 1/2 a grapefruit, and a tiny bit (1/3) of sweet potato. Surprisingly, I seemed to have improved from these dietary changes and my anxiety seems far better controlled than before. It's probably from the constant supply of ketones that the body is now producing, but who knows.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean!

I once did that in church, I'm a church chorister, and although I knew the anxiety wouldn't kill me, I was terribly worried that I would pass out. We were standing up at the time. I whiteknuckled it, and lo and behold, no fainting! I suppose it helped that from where I was standing the congregation could see only the top of my head (I'm 5'9).

As for breathing techniques, a very very simple one is to count off your breaths and make the exhale twice as long. So if you count your inhale as one, two, three, you pause an instant and exhale to the count of 6. Or use 2/4, or 1/2, whatever makes sense in the moment. You can also gradually go up in numbers and breathe slower. This is actually the warm-up from autogenic training if you want to give that a try, but just the breathing can stop an attack for me.

Well that's certainly good to hear. Several people have already told me about their improvement using breathing. I will definitely add breathing techniques to my toolbox. You just never know when something turns out to be the thing that works.

I'm going to be starting a new hospital-based meditation program -- Meditation Based Stress Relief (MBSR). It is an 8 week program that is supposed to be pretty amazing.

I'm getting the diet and exercise part of my life on the right path, so I would like to deal with the stress and anxiety now.

It's worth looking into if you have a program near you -- lots of scientifically proven benefits.

I've learned yogic / Buddhist meditation through reading books a long time ago. I just never had any issues with stress and anxiety until recently, but I have improved a lot since April when I had a very stressful month.

About a week and a half ago, I upped the iodine in my diet by switching to iodized salt (I don't eat sea food or kelp everyday to get the daily requirement of iodine) because I noticed with anxiety attacks I'd get hypothyroid like symptoms including feeling cold, palpitations, loss of appetite, difficulty breathing, and increase in body fat. With this new change, I've seen some huge improvements and now I can even do some activities that are exciting without triggering any anxiety.