When you are right in the middle anxiety or panic attack, the last thing you will think of is laughter. However, picturing yourself experiencing out of control laughter should help you to ease your panic or anxiety attacks and may also help you to prevent them. This natural coping strategy helps you to manage your panic or anxiety attack without medications.
Visualization, the act of seeing yourself in a certain situation, is an superlative tool for managing the thought process. Olympic athletes use it to mentally exercise their minds to make improvements in sports. By mentally stepping through the moves involved in an event, their skills make measurable improvements.
Studies have shown that areas of the brain cannot tell the difference between real and imagined events. If you see yourself having a good time, you will start having a good time. When you see yourself having an terrible panic or anxiety attack, you are likely to do just that.
Many visualization methods employ peaceful images to soothe the mind and gain control of anxiety, but picturing something amusing can be more effective because of its higher intensity. Uncontrolled laughter takes over the entire nervous system, encouraging a state of relaxation,escape and well-being.
Laughter has a lot of healthful blessings for your mind and body. It can assist replace panicky and fearful thoughts with calm and relaxation. Laughter greatly eases tension and reduces the tension you experience when panic or anxiety begins to set in.
Humor visualization has been consistently shown to ease panic and anxiety attacks, making them less potent and frequent. By imagining yourself in a state of hysterical laughter, you trick your thoughts and short circuit the pattern of negative emotions elevating the panic attack. The picture of laughter reduces the cortisol levels in the brain the in a similar way that real laughter does. This coping strategy works even if you do not feel joyful at the start. Just the mental picture itself will stimulate the highly beneficial outcomes of real laughter.
In case you are not able to come up with an picture of yourself laughing uncontrollably, remember back to a time of when you did. Remember what happened that caused you to laugh. Allow yourself mentally to return to that place and laugh uncontrollably once again.
You can also get a dose of highly beneficial laughter from television or DVDs. There are also plenty of web radio stations with comedic programs or you can go to a comedian’s web site and listen to or watch clips. Just got to YouTube and search for funny videos.
Often you simply need to fake it. Forcing yourself to laugh if you begin to feel fear or apprehension may lead to genuine laughter just because it is so out of place. You might find yourself laughing because you are laughing during a panic or anxiety attack, one of life's least funny events that could ever happen over your entire lifetime. Learning to laugh will help you reduce your anxiety and significantly reduce the frequency and severity of your anxiety attacks.
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