Why You Need to Encourage Your Anxiety to Get Even Worse

When you are experiencing severe anxiety or panic, you need to encourage it to get worse. Sounds counterintuitive, right? Well, what you’re going to learn is that this approach is the secret to stopping your episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks. Yes, you heard that right - you are going to be able to stop your panic attacks once and for all.

Before we jump in, I want to let you know that you're not stuck with anxiety forever. If you’re experiencing severe anxiety and panic attacks, don’t worry because I’ve been there. There is a way out. I fully recovered from my anxiety and now I have shown countless clients how to become completely free from their anxiety so they could go back to living a normal life.  I’ve put that entire framework in the link below. It’s called the 5 Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks and it’s completely free.

Alright, looking back on when I suffered from anxiety, I vividly remember the times when I'd start to feel my panic creeping in. I’d be at the dinner table and my heart would start pounding, my palms would start sweating, and I’d feel that flood of adrenaline and cortisol coursing through my body. My immediate reaction was always fear. I’d fear the panic and how it’d make me feel. I feared that I might be having a heart attack or even pass away. 

But what I didn’t know then was that episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks were just my body’s internal security alarm malfunctioning. It was my fight-or-flight response engaging when I wasn’t in any danger. So, there I was sitting at the dinner table in a safe and comfortable environment, and my body was preparing to fight a threat or flee to safety. I had all this adrenaline and cortisol coursing through my body and nowhere to release it. That’s what was creating the sensations of panic that I so feared. That’s why I felt my heart beating out of my chest, my palms were sweating, and feeling like I might even pass away. It was these stress hormones that were creating all of that. 

The reality, however, was that I was completely and entirely safe. My body was in a state of heightened vigilance, and so it was in the most protective and safe state possible. In other words, I was not being harmed or injured in any way.

Understanding that is critical and it’s the first step in stopping a panic attack. The second step is to completely change how you respond to the panic. This is where the little-known secret lies. Alright, the secret to stopping a panic attack is to strip away your fear of the panic and sensations. So, remember how I was fearful at the dinner table? Well, that fear was the fuel for my panic - it was signaling my body to release even more adrenaline and stress hormones, and that made my panic even worse. 

But we can flip the script - we can make it so we are not fearful of the panic or any of the intense sensations. When we do that – and I’m about to show you how – we immediately stop our panic attacks. 

What we’re going to do is implement Step #4 of the Fearless Approach. As a side note, don’t worry if you don’t know what the Fearless Approach is, you’ll learn about it when you download the 5-Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks. But in Step #4 you Encourage your anxiety to get worse. Here’s how you do that: when you feel severe anxiety or a panic attack coming on, instead of tensing up and becoming fearful, you instead say to yourself: "Great! Give me more anxiety!" You challenge your anxiety to do its worst. It’s like you’re telling your brain, "Is that all you've got?" 

What this does is it sends a signal to your prefrontal cortex that there's no real threat and that you're not in danger. This immediately slows down the release of stress hormones, which are the culprits behind the intensity of your anxiety.

Let's walk through how this plays out in real life. Imagine you're out to lunch with friends, and you suddenly feel a panic coming on. Instead of excusing yourself and fleeing to the bathroom, you stay seated and say to yourself, "Great! Give me more anxiety!" If you want, you can even add some profanity to that response if you think it’d be helpful. 

What you’re going to notice next is that your panic doesn’t get worse. Instead, it actually begins to decrease. So what this means is when we try to increase our anxiety, our anxiety will actually decrease to a more manageable level. It lowers your severe anxiety or panic a couple of notches on the anxiety scale and puts you back in the driver’s seat. 

Here are tips for when you Encourage your anxiety to get worse: 

1. Repeat the response several times over 
2. Say it aloud 
3. Hop up and down
4. Have a smile spread across your face.

When you do these things, I promise that you are going to stop panic attacks either immediately or within a week or so. 

Lastly, I know this can sound daunting at first. You're probably thinking, "Peter, this sounds like a recipe for disaster." But remember, we learned that anxiety is just your body’s fight or flight response at work. That means those sensations are a sign that your body is in an ultra-protective and safe state. So, don’t have any hesitation about trying to make those sensations worse and you’ll be saying goodbye to panic attacks. 

That's it for today - see you on the next post!