Panic attack treatments have been given by doctors to those who suffer from the condition for a long time. Anyone who has had to cope with the debilitating fear and discomfort of an attack will certainly put them to use when they feel the effects of an attack building up. But many have had cause to question their effectiveness.

The following scenario can serve to showcase the generally accepted panic attack treatments:

In an ordinary day spent running ordinary errands, you find yourself in line at the supermarket. Without warning, you sense a familiar and unwelcome feeling in your throat, and you begin to breathe in shallow gasps. Your chest begins to grow tight, and your heart speeds up and skips beats. You’ve had this feeling before, and you fear what’s coming. And the more you fear it, the worse it grows. You begin to get dizzy, you start to tremble, and you feel your stomach cramping. You’d give anything to avoid what’s coming, but you know with certainly that you’re only seconds away from losing it altogether and falling into a gigantic panic attack. So you start coping the only way you know how, by using what you’ve been taught in an effort to keep control and hopefully prevent the worst.

Number one among the panic attack treatments you’ve learned is deep breathing. You concentrate on breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth. While doing this, you’re supposed to think relaxing thoughts. But this effort at concentration makes you feel embarrassed and self-conscious, and that awareness stresses you out even more. The exercise isn’t working the way you’d hoped.

Next you try the second of the panic attack treatments your doctor recommends: a gradual relaxation of your muscles. You begin by tensing your shoulders, holding that for about 10 seconds, and then releasing. You do it a second, and then a third time. But as each repetition yields no result, your stress increases with each failed attempt. As you realize your stash of coping techniques is running out, your fear increases and negative emotions begin to escalate.

The last of the panic attack treatments you know of is finally put into action: you drop the groceries and get out. Adrenaline is pumping through you, and fleeing is the only option you feel is left to you. Your panic has convinced you that these are possibly your final moments, the end has arrived, and you’re finally going to go bananas right here, right now, in front of God and everyone. Running at least might get you somewhere private for your ultimate meltdown.

Ten minutes, thirty minutes, maybe an hour later, your panic has subsided. But you still don’t have your groceries.

While there may by differences in physical and emotional feelings, intensity levels, or circumstances that trigger and attack, what’s described above is likely very familiar to those who live with panic and anxiety attacks. The conviction and fear that something terrible is about to occur is very real, very intense, and very overwhelming. It may be small comfort to the sufferers, but the fact is that they are by no means alone. It’s been estimated that something like 5% of the population are dealing with anxiety disorders in some form.

But if the self-administered panic attack treatments they have been taught over the years don’t do the job of alleviating the symptoms, what will work? Are they doomed to suffer forever, or have to spend their lives taking medication as their only means of relief? Or is it possible that there’s a means of stopping a panic attack before it even begins, rather than try (in vain) to cope with them after they’ve already begin?

In fact, it is possible to end the cycle of panic attacks. It involves a method of curing the fear by facing it head on. Deep down, we all know that the only way to overcome a fear is to turn and face it – if we continually run from it, it will only follow us. It may seem paradoxical, but the most effective of all panic attack treatments is to welcome an attack, even to hope for one to come.

If you voluntarily move toward an anxiety attack, instead of fighting to hold it off, the control begins to move back to you. You begin to wield the power over the situation, not your panic. You’ll learn that consciously choosing to experience and confront a panic attack renders it far less likely that you’ll even be able to have one. While you may understand on an intellectual level that a panic attack can’t hurt you, it’s only when you realize this emotionally that you will start becoming victorious over your demons. This technique will prove to you that you can face, confront, and conquer your fear.