Panic Attack
Thoughts
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Monitoring your negative thoughts can be very helpful in getting
control over the thoughts that may be forming the underpinnings of
your anxiety and panic attacks.
This is especially the case if you’ve already
gone through your own thoughts and found some of the common and
recurring distortions and replaced them with more realistic ones
(which I certainly hope that at this stage of the newsletter you
have).
Self-monitoring is quite
simple.
All you need to do is go through each day and,
every time you have a negative thought, keep
count. Some
people find it useful to use a golf counter that would be
used for counting score in a golf game, but really a simply
piece of writing paper will work. The important idea is that
you keep count of every negative thought you
have.
Alternatively you might try honing in on specific
recurring thoughts that you have noted when you did the previous
mentioned steps of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
(CBT).
Now self-monitoring might sound over simplistic
but it is backed by science. The mere act of counting negative
thoughts seems often* to be an effective step at combating
them. In my opinion
having had the opportunity to analyze your thoughts makes you a
better detective at picking up on them.
* I use the word “often” because any CBT
technique is not absolutely guaranteed to work but the idea is to
not give up and when one CBT doesn’t work, then it’s time to try
another.
The great news is that many CBT techniques exist
and in this continuous newsletter I keep presenting more and more
over time so I would submit that probability increases greatly over
time – not to mention of course many other things are continuously
covered, not just CBT.
But self-monitoring is something that is
worthwhile trying. You
might be surprised.
Helpful things do not have to be complicated
things. Mental
Health professionals suggest giving self-monitoring at least
a 3 week chance.
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