How to Help Someone Dealing with Anxiety and Panic Attacks?

Anxiety makes the person feel overwhelmed with negative emotions. A person who is suffering from anxiety often feels they have nobody who will understand what they are going through. This feeling of loneliness is always accompanied by depression, making the person feel helpless.

If your loved one is suffering from anxiety and often experiences severe panic attacks, you may have also felt helpless. You want to help them calm down, but everything you do just exaggerates their struggles. For people living in California, a San Diego anxiety treatment center will help your loved one suffering from this mental illness. But what else can you do apart from admitting them to a mental health facility? Let us find out!

How To Identify Whether Someone Is Suffering From Anxiety?

Now, anxiety most often has similar symptoms as stress. When stressed, people become easily irritated and start acting differently than they normally do. Stress is part and parcel of life, and there is nothing much to worry about. However, the real problem arises when stress transforms into anxiety.

When a person suffers from anxiety, you will often hear them explain their condition as “panicky,” “stressed,” “tensed,” “nervous,” and “overwhelmed.” But what differentiates anxiety from stress is its severity. People suffering from anxiety often feel uneasy for a longer period. On the other hand, suffering from stress is momentary, and once a particular event passes, the stress goes away.

Now you know that anxiety actually makes the person feel helpless. So, how do you help them? Let us find out in the section below.

Helping a Loved One Suffering From Anxiety

Seeing your loved one struggling to overcome anxiety and experiencing panic attacks frequently can make you feel helpless as well. But you must be patient and offer them the appropriate help. For this, you must:

Try To Understand Their Condition
One of the ways you can help your loved one suffering from anxiety is by learning about their situation and identifying ways through which you can help them. For this, you can read stories about others who have experienced anxiety. In addition to this, you can also ask your loved one about the pain and experience of dealing with anxiety. Ask them about how anxiety impacts their day-to-day life and portray your empathy vividly. This will enable them to trust you and create a strong bond.

Always Treat the Person With Respect and Dignity
If the person is suffering from severe panic attacks caused by anxiety, chances are they are going to act differently and get paranoid even at the smallest of threats. In such situations, it is important to treat the person with respect and dignity. You must try to understand that there is an underlying cause behind how they behave, and therefore, you must validate their emotion. However, you must also remember that it is essential to gauge their emotional capacity in such situations to determine their ability to make decisions for themselves.

Ask Them How You Can Help
Most often, it is difficult to understand how you can help your loved one, so it is best to ask them directly. Maybe they want you to hold their hands to feel better or to practice breathing exercises with them so that they are in control of their thoughts and emotions. A person suffering from the illness knows best how you can support them, so if you are feeling confused, ask them how you can help them.

Encourage Them To Seek Professional Help
If you are starting to notice that the mental health situation of the person is becoming a big threat to their well-being, it is important to encourage them to seek professional help. Firstly, you must destigmatize the idea of seeking help. Make them understand that opting to enroll in an anxiety treatment center doesn’t mean the person is “crazy.” After this, you can book an appointment for anxiety therapy to help relieve their discomfort and find a solution to their mental illness.

Conclusion

When you are trying to help your loved one who is suffering from anxiety, you need to understand that the first step towards helping them is winning their trust. To do this, you have to educate yourself about the situation. Once you have gained their trust, they will start confiding in you about their difficulties and the silent battles they fight with themselves daily. This will allow you to guide them towards seeking medical help and soon overcome their mental illness.

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