Passive Anxiety

As you can probably see this is not a concept no limited to panic attacks but that will be my focus here.

Many people who come down with anxiety and panic attacks may get trapped in this pattern of behaviour – with respect to how they deal with their anxiety. 

They become very passive and mistakenly think that the person who can solve their problem is another person.  They may wait until their next session with a therapist or their next appointment with a doctor. 

Of course when they attend their appointment they might be let down because they have put the other person in charge of their emotions.  They have in effect given control of their emotions and their recovery to someone else. (I’m not suggesting the other professionals and people in your life don’t matter just that ultimately you are in charge of you.)

You’ll no doubt recall me mentioning before how important it is to be proactive in your approach to panic attacks.  This is because being an active director of your own life is not only very empowering but a requirement.

While quite the opposite is true: if you’re passive in life you will tend to dither with decisions about what to do and this causes stress which can contribute and worsen anxiety and panic attacks.

So commitment in one direction or another can actually be freeing, not entrapping.

Taking personal responsibility for the overall plan of your recovery is key.

Here are some suggestions about getting this approach kick started:

1. Looking at an overall global plan: Sit down with a pen and paper and really brainstorm all the ways you can think of to assist with your anxiety (wink, wink, nudge, nudge much has been discussed in my newsletter). 

2. Ensure that your plan involves having a variety of things in your life.  For example, when you think of the word “health”, health obviously does not just refer to physical health but emotional, financial, spiritual, physical, etc. So variety in your life is important.

3. You should now have a pretty good list of things you can begin doing – an overall strategy.  So the final steps is to divide the global plan into manageable chunks.