How To Deal With A Panic Attack on a 14hr Flight

I want to share a personal experince with you. So many client come into my room sharing their stories of anxiety, heart ache, trauma and pain knowing that I can help them but not realising why. Yes, I have my qualifications that hang on the wall, but more than that there is so many personal experiences that is under it all.

Anxiety is one of them. I used to do it very well. I used to call myself a stressed person. That is just who I was and how I navigated the world. I didn't know any different or that I could be different.

This instance was not exception. I was 21 going on my first long haul flight for work as a fashion designer. This was my dream come true, travelling for work. Shopping 4 countries in 10days with the first stop being LA. I set off so excited until I got 8hrs into the flight. I look up and the fear sets in. When I look around it is like the walls are caving in. A feeling of claustraphobia starts waving over me. I can feel my breathing start to get more and more shallow and rapid. I think to myself 'What is happening?' I had never experienced anything like it before.

The problem was I had not only never experienced this before, but I was a shy, timid 21year old girl who didn't like asking for help. I wanted to work through this myself in some way, but the more I looked around the dizzier I felt and worse it got.

The only thing I knew to do was to close my eyes, listen to a meditation and try my best to go to sleep. I put my hand on my belly to guide my breathing, and eventually fell asleep.

From that trip onwards I made it my mission to work out, why what I did worked and how to ensure it wouldn't happen again.

Two of my superpowers is self awareness and compartmentalisation. How did this help me:

Self Awareness

When you have heighten level of self awareness you can take the observation perspective on your self. You observe what you do and how you do it. The blessing about this in the middle of an anxious moment like a panic attack is that when you take the observation perspective you discharge the energy output to feeling the emotions of the moment.

Compartmentalisation

Compartmentalisation is the next level to self awareness. It is about noticing the emotions and then learning to set them aside or let them go. Knowing that in that particular moment they don't serve you.

These are just 2 of the 6 pillars that I work with when helping you move through anxiety and panic attacks. When do this in hypnosis they become an automatic part of life. Not a tool to utilise but part of the way our brain automatically works.

It will automatically know when to focus on throught and feeling and when not to. When to ruminate on them or not to. How to access whether a situation is work reacting to or not.

The reality is, the walls on that plane were not moving, they were not caving in and I was not in the middle of a disaster like my brain was trying to tell me.

Having these automatic thought processes happening in the background of your mind, not only stops the reoccurring panic attack on the plane, but also spill over into all areas of life with all situations that use to make you anxious.

If this is something that you are ready to move through fill in the contact form here and lets chat on what hypnotherapy can assist you.