The symptoms of anxiety attacks such as shortness of breath, rapid heart rate, dizziness, derealization, the fear of dying, and others are rarely dangerous to the person experiencing them. What makes panic attacks seem impossible to stop is the fact the symptoms of anxiety attacks feed on each other. To describe this briefly, the physical symptoms of anxiety attacks interact with a person’s catastrophic thinking about what is going in their body. “Oh no! Another panic attack! I can’t stand this! What am I going to do? Is this going to make me lose my mind?” You get the idea.
A much better approach to stopping an anxiety attack is to embrace it. Think of the symptoms of anxiety attacks as a wave that you are learning to catch so that you can ride it forward. Running a from a wave just doesn’t work.