Ball State

» panic attacks

By China at 9:10 AM

It seems that there are truly so many people who are suffering from panic attacks and stress and anxiety symptoms related disorders. Many are embarrassed to tell people about their problem and really try to hide this fact from others. When a friend of mine told me about her "problem" and the embarrassment she suffered, I really thought that it was all in her head, which I didn't let on to her, but I really was uneducated and uninformed about this disorder, and having never experienced one of these attacks before, I really just thought that it was another excuse to medicate people and call it a disorder. Well, I felt that I needed to know more about what my friend was going through, and I went online to do some research of my own, and I was really amazed at what I found. There were many sites claiming that this is a psychological disorder and they went through a list of the medications that were available to treat and deal with these disorders. I personally find being medicated for the rest of your life a totally unacceptable solution, so I kept looking and what I found really amazed me. I stumbled across this site run by a man, Charles Linden, who had suffered from anxiety & panic attacks for many years. Discouraged and fed up with feeling totally out of control, he began doing his own research on this topic and came up with a real behavioral cause for panic attacks. He found that in the human brain there is a part that is called the Amygdala and this part of the brain is basically responsible for the fight or flight response that our bodies have. In the standard brain, this "switch" stays off until a traumatic response triggers it on. In the brain of those suffering from anxiety however, the switch seems to stay on and thus causes a heightened response to every stimulus, large and small, causing the body to overreact to any stimulus. Basically he uses something called operant conditioning which is a way of retraining the Amygdala to only respond when there is a real threat and to remain shut the rest of the time. I called my friend and told her and she is getting started on this program, after all there are no drugs or surgery involved, plus they offer a money back guarantee, so we both feel there is really nothing to lose by giving the Linden Method a try.