Coping with panic attacks can be challenging and requires mindfulness. The person must regulate one's emotions effectively and maintain composure. Given the chronic nature of panic attacks, its remedy measures need holistic approaches, lifestyle changes, and medications.
Meditation is increasingly considered an effective remedy for panic attacks. It encourages a sense of calmness and eases the symptoms to quite an extent. Let us go deeper into what is meditation.
What is Meditation?
Meditation is a process wherein you focus on calming your mind while avoiding distractions. Those who can do so will experience mind clarity, heightened awareness, and relaxation.
Techniques like controlled breathing, visualization, and mindfulness are parts of meditation. These are used to promote inner peace and contentment and can better deal with panic attacks.
Meditation has its roots in many spiritual and contemplative traditions. In recent times, it has evolved as a potential remedy for many mental health concerns, such as stress, lack of concentration, anxiety, and depression.
So, how exactly does meditation help in curbing panic attacks? The following paragraphs will decipher.
Role of Meditation in Preventing Panic Attacks
The symptoms of panic attacks vary from person to person. People might experience a heightened sense of fear, anxiety, and nervousness during a panic attack. It triggers distress in the individual and activates the fight-or-flight response system.
As a result, the concentration of the adrenaline hormone increases by two and a half times or even more. This hormone puts your body on alert mode and your heartbeat quickens. Breathing becomes fast, oxygen intake increases, and blood sugar level rises.
At the brain level, panic attacks cause a serotonin imbalance that impacts moods. All in all, both the mind and body are dysregulated. An effective panic attack management approach revolves around regulation and bringing your mind and body back in sync.
Meditation for anxiety and panic attacks is a mind-body practice that awakens the body’s relaxation response and addresses these issues at many levels.
Reduced Amygdala Activities
Regular meditation can calm the mind so that it can deal with heightened stress during a panic attack.
When performed correctly and consistently, meditation can reduce the activities of the amygdala. It is the alarm center of the brain that triggers the fight-or-flight response and triggers the nervous and endocrine responses to prepare a human to react. It balances the emotional response to sensory input.
Meditation promotes regulated blood flow in the amygdala and augments the prefrontal cortex activities. This way, individuals observing meditation regularly will have better control over negative stimuli. Hence, the panic attack becomes easy to control and manage.
Stress Reduction
Stress is a trigger for panic attacks. Thus, stress reduction is the first line of treatment for panic attacks. Studies confirm that meditation makes individuals less prone to stress by reducing the concentration of the stress-inducing hormone cortisol.
Better Emotional Well-being
Emotional well-being matters the most for panic attack management. Meditation has shown tremendous results in restraining negative thinking. It can reduce the frequency of negative thoughts and shrink adverse cognizance.
Meditation can increase one’s ability to disconnect from a negative stream of thoughts and promote coherence.
Regulated Nervous System
During a panic attack, the sympathetic nervous system activates. As a result, adrenaline and norepinephrine concentrations in the body start mounting. The primary requirement for bringing the body to return to its original state is activating the parasympathetic nervous system.
Deep breathing is a key meditation technique. It allows one to breathe from the diaphragm and expand the belly. This process makes breaths slow-going and deep. As a result, more oxygen enters our brain and activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
This calms down the sympathetic nervous system. The immediate result is a cool-headed mind with reduced anxiety, stress, and depression.
Types of Meditation for Panic Attack Management
Many types of meditation exist to foster mental, physical, and emotional health. These techniques to deal with a panic attack work differently for different individuals.
The ideal approach to using meditation for panic attacks is to practice a couple of meditation methods multiple times. This will help people to understand which technique fits them the most.
Breathing Meditation or Mindful Breathing
As its name indicates, breathing meditation or mindful breathing is all about how we breathe. The prime focus of this meditation technique is to bring one’s attention to the breath and cultivate a heightened awareness of the moment by concentrating on the breath rhythm.
Grounding Meditation
This meditation method tries to connect individuals with the present by promoting self-awareness and physical sensation of the body. This creates a sense of balance and stability.
It generally starts with focusing on the feet and sensing the grounding. Later, you can shift your focus to any solid object you can touch with your hands. You must engage your senses by focusing on the physical sensations around you.
Mindfulness Meditation
This form of meditation has its roots in Buddhist traditions and involves focusing on your thoughts and eventually letting them go. You must figure out why a specific thought comes into your mind and control its flow.
This type of meditation is great for preventing panic attacks because it helps emotional regulation and improves cognitive functioning.
Under a panic attack, tons of thoughts flow through one’s mind, and mindfulness promotes heightened self-awareness and controls the flow of thoughts.
Walking Meditation
This is a fully guided meditation for panic attacks that encourages mindfulness, intentional breathing, and rhythmic movements. Walking meditation involves shifting the entire focus on the act of walking and being aware of every step.
This helps people to replace stress-provoking thoughts with the act of walking. It also makes a person more aware of the present.
The rhythmic and deliberate pace of walking meditation provides a calming and grounding effect. The repetitive movement can help regulate the nervous system. This promotes a sense of stability and reduces physiological arousal associated with panic attacks.
Mantra Meditation
The key purpose of mantra meditation for a panic attack is to calm the mind by repeating a mantra, which could be a word, a phrase, a sound, or a thought.
As we chant, it behaves like a focal point for concentration. This method encourages a person to center the entire focus on the mantra. The mind starts focusing on the chant rather than on stress-inducing thoughts. This ends the negative thought patterns.
Visualization Meditation
Visualization meditation involves creating mental images of a place where you feel safe and secure. As this visualization occurs, our mind relaxes, stress fades, and anxiety is gone.
Visualization-guided meditation for panic attacks provides a constructive and engaging focus for the mind. This form of meditation guides your thoughts toward calming and creates positive mental images. It drifts your attention away from panic-inducing triggers and thoughts. Due to this, the cycle of anxiety breaks down.
The vivid imagination of a peaceful scene or a place relaxes the body. Besides, it lowers the physiological arousal one might experience during a panic attack.
Key Takeaways
Terror, anxiety, stress, discomfort, and a sense of fear feed panic attacks. Handling them would require removing all these factors in the first place. Meditation has the potential to diminish its frequency and intensity.
However, one should look beyond meditation for panic attack management. We recommend discussing the symptoms with a certified clinical care professional to know the underlying causes and lay the appropriate course of treatment.
You must practice guided meditation in combination with suggested therapies and medications and work with a holistic approach.