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If you begin experiencing panic attacks and visit your doctor, most likely he or she will either prescribe you a benzodiazepine such as Xanax, or an antidepressant. If counseling is recommended, you may enter into a lengthy series of cognitive therapy sessions. Prescription drugs and cognitive therapy are the two most common ways of treating panic attacks and general anxiety. In other articles I've discussed the limitations and dangers of prescriptions drugs to treat anxiety, and many readers have asked me to elaborate upon cognitive therapy and give reasons on why I do not believe it is effective for treatment of panic attacks or general anxiety.
Cognitive therapy works by using logical reason to condition your reaction to an event. For example, let's say you have had frequent panic attacks while driving, and now you are at the point where you avoid driving altogether, for fear of having another attack. Perhaps your panic attacks in the car are normally set off by something unexpected happening, such as a person in another car cutting you off. I don't care who you are, if someone cuts you off on the highway suddenly you are going to have a surge of adrenaline! But how do you interpret this surge? While most people might recover quickly, a person with panic disorder may see the physical symptoms as something more dangerous, a sign of an impending heart attack, or fear of a recurring panic attack, and this will set the cycle of fear in motion, where the physical symptoms in the body, and the anxious thoughts in the mind feed off one another over and over again.
In traditional therapy, the therapist would work with you to eliminate panic by conditioning your response in vivo (in life) or through introceptive therapy. In vivo means the therapist, in this case, may drive around with you in the car. The hope is to condition your response to an event such as getting "cut off". The theory behind cognitive therapy is that you have the event, the interpretation, and then the physical response. So the belief is that by changing your interpretation of the event, you will also change the physical response and not go into a panic attack. However, what actually happens is this: event -> physical response -> interpretation. The physical response comes before the interpretation. Think about it. If you are cut off suddenly on the road, do you have time to interpret the event? Of course not. It happens so quickly that you have the physical reaction first, then later you will make the interpretation.
Instead of using traditional therapy to eliminate panic attacks, you may want to consider techniques which have been developed, based on sound psychological principles, for the soul purpose of breaking the cycle of fear and anxiety, which will in turn help you to eliminate panic attacks for good.
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