Panic attacks are a common feature in many different mental health problems from stress and generalised anxiety, to post-traumatic stress disorder and OCD.
Many people suffer with panic attacks so to help manage these, this course will aim to give you information and techniques that you can use to reduce or even stop your panic attacks. This course can be used as a stand-alone treatment option, or as part of a longer course of therapy. Delivered over three sessions, it can even be done whilst you are waiting for another type of treatment.
What does the course cover?
The Managing Panic course is a three-week treatment programme aimed at managing symptoms of panic and/or panic attacks. Each week is a 90-minute session to guide you in developing an understanding of your panic symptoms, to learn about what may be maintaining your panic and to develop therapeutic techniques for reducing panic.
The first session consists of an introduction to both anxiety and panic. You will learn about the common symptoms of anxiety and how these may differ from symptoms of a panic attack. During this first week, we discuss in detail how panic attacks start and what maintains them. We understand that panic attacks can feel scary so we take time during this first session to look at some of the common beliefs that we have about panic and how we may engage in certain behaviours to help our panic.
In the second session, we focus on what happens to our body when we experience panic, and exactly why our body makes us feel all of those symptoms. By understanding why we feel the way we do when we panic, we begin to recognise that panic may not be as dangerous or as scary as we often think it is! We also look again at those behaviours and reconsider how helpful they are.
The third and final session teaches you techniques to manage and reduce your panic by creating diaries for our panic, which can reduce any worries or fears we may have about our panic attacks. We also consider how we can start to think differently about our panic – another method that can reduce the panic itself.
Each week we also give you some important activities to complete between the sessions to help reinforce what you are learning, and show you how these strategies can work.
This treatment programme is appropriate for all clients experiencing symptoms of panic, even if this is not the main problem that you would like to address in therapy. It is a course that can be completed either as a standalone treatment or whilst you are waiting for another form of therapy with us.
