Dealing With Your Anxiety Attacks with anxiety for a short span or a longer period of time is frustrating and the effects it brings your body can be undeniably threatening. Just imaging having your heart racing, hear strong loud palpitations, experience excessive sweating, muscle trembling or shortness of breath.

These signs and symptoms that accompany triggers anxiety itself can severely intensify the situation which can cause harmful damage emotionally as well as physically. To help you cope and relieve the symptoms of panic attacks, below are some interventions that you can use to help you feel calm and cool.

Do deep breathing.

Whenever an acute panic attack heads on your way, find a comfortable place wherein you can sit down and do deep breathing. This technique is among the best solution to help you get a grip of yourself and find your way to clarity and creativeness.

Inhaling deeply through your nose calms your mind and body. Doing a couple of deep breathing rounds proves to relieve any type of stress, fear, manic mood and anxiety.

Know what triggers your anxiety.

To help you prevent future anxiety or panic attacks, you need to know the things, events and factors that trigger your attacks. Having to know these elements and trigger factor is a number one preventive precaution to help you get away and minimize your anxiety attacks.

Overcome your fears.

Usually, we tend to be anxious because we perceive an upcoming threat. Anxiety in nature is good for the body thus, feeling this kind of emotion makes us normal.

But again, too much anxiety can lead us to a more serious health issues such as depression and other related mental disorders. To help minimize the cause of your anxiety, you need to let go and overcome your fears before it bites you. Most of the time, dealing with your own fears will lead you in curing your own anxiety problems.

Eliminate and channel your disturbing emotions.

During an anxiety or panic attack, you feel nervous, frustrated, confused and very much in a state of overwhelm. During this state, you manifest a lack focus and your mind doesn't get the hold on the current situation.

Whenever these disturbing emotions start to rise, you may try to channel these negative energies and turn them into positive ones.

Use different mind body techniques such as music therapy, do emotional freedom techniques, engage with guided imagery, meditation, yoga or try self hypnosis. This way, you can turn your negative vibes and channel them using these relaxing and worthwhile activities. You'll soon turn away from your own anxiety and find yourself at peace and calmness.

Personal Development Strategies - How to Be More Sensitive to Others

What practical steps can we take to develop sensitivity to other people?

Some might be tempted to answer with a list of behaviors that you can learn: lean forward; say, 'Yes... uh-huh'; reflect; paraphrase; summarize; show unconditional positive regard; align metaphors with the other person; match body language, tone of voice...

I fell out with this approach when I started to teach 100 hour communication skills classes. I remember a male nurse I taught who had 'all the moves' but who sounded completely insincere. Something had to change!

To be sensitive to others you need to be emotionally available. That goes way beyond technique, so let's not settle for half- or quarter-measures!

How can I become more sensitive to other people?

When you ask yourself this question, you are entering territory that has been crossed by every trainee nurse, counselor, therapist, social worker, physical therapist, occupational therapist, life-coach or integrative therapist. And the list probably doesn't end there!

All those of us who work with people, particularly in the areas of health, education and personal growth have usually worked long and hard to develop our sensitivity to others.

What are some of the approaches the trainees in these fields of work use?

The first is to recognize, acknowledge, and attend to one's own personal needs. Those of us who choose to help others need to be very clear about our own motives. Without a doubt, our own pain is a strong motivating force that can drive us to want to help others. Be careful!

Unacknowledged and uncared-for, our own needs are the greatest barrier to becoming more sensitive to others.

Yet, our own needs - buried for years - are not necessarily easily recognized. They are unconscious. They exist outside of our awareness.

So the first step in developing our own ability to empathize is to bring our buried needs into our own awareness.

Be watchful of the ways you react to other people: to who they are; to how they act; to the things they say; to the values they express; to the political opinions they hold... in fact to anything that 'gets your goat' (as me ol' grandma used to say!).

You react to these 'petty tyrants' because they reflect back to you something that you've labelled 'unacceptable' and tried to disown.

Fritz Perls, who is called the father of American Gestalt therapy, said this:

"We live our lives as if our body is a house and our eyes are the windows of the house. I have news for you. Those windows are not windows. They are mirrors."

In other words, we see the world through the filters of our own beliefs, values and attitudes. And in a very fundamental sense, these are not our own in any really wholesome way.

We have learned how to see the world - mainly through strong childhood experiences - according to the norms of our particular culture, educational system, family and other significant people in our lives.

We've been told, 'Good boy...' or 'Bad girl...' and been praised or punished accordingly.

This hurts.

We don't need to be talking about abuse or neglect here. In any average family the process of molding the kids into model citizens creates hurts and resentments.

This puts some distance between who we are and our natural capacity to be joyful, understanding, exuberant and, above all, sensitive human beings.

We've become desensitized to our own hurts. We had to push them away, because expressing them began to feel dangerous. We need to address this if we are going to become truly sensitive to others. We need to become better at feeling - and accepting - our own pain.

It's a great idea to keep a journal of your reactions. Spend some time quietly recording, and reflecting on, the thoughts and feelings that these 'critical incidents' arouse in you. The idea is definitely NOT to judge the way you feel. Adding judgements like, 'I shouldn't feel this way...'; ' I wish I hadn't reacted like that...' and so on are part of the problem, not the solution!

Next, tune in to your own inner dialogue. What - or who - do you hear? What is your relationship with yourself like? When you talk to yourself, are you supportive or critical. Can you identify an inner judge and an inner victim? Do you begin to understand the Book of Laws that the judge uses to persecute the victim?

Write down exactly the words you use. Look at them, allow them to be. No dramas.

In providing yourself with a safe space to sit down and be with yourself unconditionally, you are learning how to provide that safe space for others.

But far more important than that in the short run, bringing these hidden aspects of yourself out into the light will help them dissipate. For a long time I've used an analogy of a demon-confronting nightmare for this kind of work. It's the kind of nightmare where once you stop and turn around, you realise you're being chased by a kitten, not a monster.

One of the things that will happen as you use your journal in this way, is that you will develop a broader and broader range of emotional shapes and colours, of feeling words, words that describe physical sensations in your body.

You should begin to react less and respond more. I understand respond to mean to have a measured and considered approach to issues that previously would have sparked unexpected and unwelcome thoughts or feelings. Things that would have riled you (or upset you, or made you fearful, jealous, resentful) no longer do so.

As you progress with this work, you will find that you have a quieter, more peaceful mind that finds it easier and easier to make constructive, creative space available to another person.

With my good wishes for your journey. The world needs more sensitive listeners.


Robert Fordham is the Owner/Manager of Deeper Coaching, a face-to-face and online coaching service.

Robert's approach to coaching developed out of 25 years of practicing and teaching integrative/energy medicine; his own personal development work and is influenced by meditation and indigenous wisdom, east and west.

Warning: Your Pain May Be Caused By Trapped Emotions
What do seniors talk about when they get together? Almost certainly... aches and pains. Gracefully Aging and suffering and pain do not go together. According to Dr. Bradley Nelson, much of our suffering is due to negative emotional energies that have become trapped within us. He developed the Emotion Code, a simple and powerful method of finding and releasing these trapped energies. So here's a word of warning: Trapped emotions may be the cause of your pain.

In everyday life, we experience many emotions and then we move on. But sometimes we have experiences that are traumatic or for other reasons that are not understood, emotions are not processed completely and those emotions become trapped within the physical body and they may show up as the cause of pain somewhere in your body. So the physical effect from an experience might be silent and invisible, but later on will manifest symptoms from it such as pain and disease. to Nelson, "Trapped emotions are truly epidemic, and are the insidious, invisible cause of much suffering and illness, both physical and emotional in nature. I am not saying that releasing trapped emotions is a cure-all. The Emotion Code should not be used by itself in attempting to address any major disease or medical condition, but rather, it should be looked upon as an adjunctive therapy. When trapped emotions are contributing to physical illness, removing them can only help."

The Emotion Code is an energy healing modality. Energy healing is one of the oldest practices known in the world today. Since 4000 B.C., healers have understood that our health greatly depends on the quality of energy that flows through and makes up our bodies.

As an energy healer, what I really like about the Emotion Code is that removing trapped emotions is permanent. The same emotion may appear again later, but it's like an onion and the same emotion might be on a different layer. is difficult for people to understand is the concept of energy in energy healing because it could be invisible. Everything is energy. We can compare this energy to electricity. We can't see electricity, but we can feel it when we get a shock. Your thoughts are energy as well. We may think that our unspoken thoughts are private and confined to our own heads, but in actuality, we are constantly broadcasting the energy of our thoughts affecting all of those around us.

Using the Emotion Code, we detect the energy of another person's thoughts or feelings by asking the body questions and actually getting definitive answers instead of guessing. Then the trapped emotions are released for good and are permanently gone.

So if you're suffering from any disease or pain, could there be trapped emotions involved? What if releasing the trapped emotions using the Emotion Code results in releasing you from pain? Would you then be able to gracefully age and really enjoy life? How would it really feel to live life without pain and enjoy life to its fullest?