What can i do to avoid anxiety attacks and improve my work and personal life?

Hi Sam,

Many thanks for reaching out to find help with your anxiety. I understand that living with anxiety can be an emotionally draining, scary and demoralizing experience but help can be found and reaching out is the first step to finding what may work for you. 

Thank you for expressing your difficulty and a little about having frequent anxiety attacks. This sounds as though it must be having a big impact on your life and how you see yourself and I can see that it's also made you sad and feel lost and possibly quite isolated also. I can hear that you are also feeling desperate for a way to feel better and gain control of your life and I can understand how difficult that may seem right now but I you've made a brave step already by talking about the difficulties you're facing. 

In some ways you've already part answered your question in that you've identified that you're struggling with your thinking. These thought patterns are likely to be causing negative feelings and negative behaviors that all feed back to producing the same or similar negative thoughts. An example of this might be seen with doubting yourself. Such a thought may lead to a feeling of being incapable, being unable and/or being less than you really are. These thoughts and feelings may then cause negative behaviors such as avoiding the situation entirely which may make you feel worse because you didn't believe in yourself or may make you so nervous and worried that you start to panic because you feel under threat.

It's my belief that the key is in tackling the problem on two fronts. The first is to understand the thought process so that you can learn to challenge the negative thoughts and feelings and encorage better outcome and the second lies in understanding how the anxiety arose in the first place. This can help with our understanding that these thoughts/feelings and behaviours are not really your fault in that they're learned coping mechanisms that may be doing more harm than good. When given the opportunity to explore these aspects in therapy, you can practice self forgiveness and self understanding whilst being proactive in changing old habits and finding new ways of tackling these difficulties and of course with support.

I hope this little explanation helps answer your question but also gives you some confidence to know that these difficulties can be overcome. Take care.