Natural Panic Attack Treatments

Diane Ulicsni knows all too well how terrifying panic attacks can be. For more than 12 years, Ulicsni, director of The Hypnosis Center in Lake Oswego, Ore., suffered from chronic panic attacks that led her on a seemingly endless round of doctor and emergency room visits. Convinced she was having a heart attack -- or a nervous breakdown -- Ulicsni endured the all-too-common symptoms of panic attacks (also known as panic disorder), which include a feeling of intense fear, sense of doom, or feeling of unreality, accompanied by physical symptoms such as a racing or pounding heartbeat; difficulty breathing or a feeling of choking; sweating, shaking, or flushing; chest pains; dizziness, light-headedness, or nausea; fear of losing control; and tingling or numbness in the hands.

Ulicsni, who finally found relief from her panic attacks through hypnosis and is now a board certified hypnotherapist, says that hypnosis -- which has been recognized by the American Medical Association since 1958 as a form of treatment -- is one of several non-drug approaches that can significantly ease, if not cure, panic attacks.

Hypnosis can strengthen the effect of the mind on the body, says Ulicsni, by changing the way you perceive sensations, narrowly focusing your attention so you're not overwhelmed by the symptoms of a panic attack, and relaxing you physically.

In addition to hypnosis, other nondrug therapies that may (or may not, depending on whom you ask) work for panic attacks include humor, energy psychology such as "tapping" (also known as thought field therapy), and -- perhaps the most widely studied, and some would say, most successful -- cognitive behavioral therapy.

Laugh your panic attacks away? That's a good strategy, says Steven Sultanoff, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Irvine, Calif., and past president of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor. Sultanoff uses humor visualization with his panic attack patients, asking them to see themselves in a situation where they've laughed uncontrollably. When panic symptoms arise, the patients go back to that image of themselves laughing.

"Humor replaces the distressing emotions of a panic attack," says Sultanoff, "and, if the humor leads to outright laughter, it changes the physiological responses of the attack as well." When you're anxious, he explains, your serum cortisol -- or stress hormone -- level rises; laughter is believed to reduce the cortisol levels.

Diane Roberts Stoler, EdD, a licensed psychologist in Georgetown, Mass., has been treating patients with panic attacks with cognitive behavioral therapy and hypnosis for more than 25 years and says that until recently, those were always her first choices. But as she has received training in energy psychology and has seen it work quickly for patients, she says, "I am now a true believer and it is now my first choice for anxiety and panic disorders."