How I beat Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Agoraphobia without taking a single pill.

Hi. My name is Andrew Thomas. I know exactly what you’re experiencing. Stress, depression, panic attacks and anxiety messed up my life for years.

I know first hand how stress can make you feel - helpless, lonely, isolated and afraid. For a while I was living a nightmare; at one point I thought I was going mad. I was afraid to leave my house - even to go to the shops just a hundred yards away. I used to wake from nightmares in the middle of each night, soaking wet with sweat - terrified.

That was the low point. Today I’m completely cured and I didn’t take one pill, tablet or potion to do it! I’m happy, relaxed and I enjoy life to the full. I even ran a half marathon this year! 

Now for some great news! There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same.

I’ve created this web site to share my experiences with you, to show you how I recovered and most importantly to help you get your life back to where you want it to be.

Let’s get started.

There are two things that you must do before you can begin to move forward:

• Make a commitment to yourself now. Promise yourself that your health and recovery will take top priority in your life.

Accept the fact that it is you that is going to get yourself well. I will help you, other people can help you, but it is you who has to take the responsibility to put into action what you learn.

Good. Now you’ve accepted responsibility and commitment for getting yourself well; what do you need to do to achieve it? The four most important things in my recovery were:

• Look after your body. A healthy person is made up from two parts – a healthy body and a healthy mind. The two work together. We are going to look at the health of your mind, but a healthy diet, regular exercise and generally looking after your physical health has a big impact on your overall well-being.
  
  
• Learn how to relax. Relaxation is the antidote to stress. To demonstrate this, try this exercise now. Close your eyes then clench your fists as tight as you can as if you are gripping onto something as hard as you can. Feel the tension in your hands – you may even feel it in your neck and shoulders. Now let go. Slowly uncurl your fingers and let them relax. Feel how much better that is.
  
  
• Get to know yourself. Find out what makes you behave the way you do. Find out why you react badly to stress while other people brush it aside with ease. Analyse what events in your life made you the person you are. Learn how undo negative beliefs that hinder you and change them into positive beliefs that help you.
  
  
• Increase your stress capacity. Athletes gradually strengthen their heart and muscle stamina by a pattern of work out periods followed by relaxation periods. Over time more intense workouts followed by quality recovery times lead to optimum performance. We can do the same to build up our resistance to stress by gradually increasing our exposure to stress followed by quality recovery time. This gradually builds up our resistance to stress.

All of the above will lead to positive changes in many parts of your life but it is important to recognise that the key to a permanent cure is to apply what you learn each and every day. Think of it as your medicine. If a doctor prescribed you medicine you wouldn’t take some one day, miss the next, take two doses the next and so on. You would take it each day as prescribed until you are well again. The same applies with what I am going to show you. It is not enough to put aside five minutes each day to curing yourself. You have to apply what you learn continuously – hour by hour.

The good news is that it’s easy!

Take this example. I used to have a stiff neck and shoulders, and headaches caused by muscle tension that was brought about through anxiety and stress. Once I learned how to ‘let go’ (more about this in the meditation, yoga and tai-chi pages of this site) then it was easy to recognise when I was getting tense and easy to let my muscles relax. The only work involved was to recognise that I was tense and let go – less than 10 seconds effort.

You’re now ready to get started.

The first thing you must do is to learn all you can about your enemy. Click on the appropriate link, stress, panic attacks, agoraphobia or anxiety then read everything about your condition. Once you begin to understand exactly what you’re dealing with, then the easier it will be to put things right.

The next thing is to begin to build relaxation into your daily life. I found that meditation and tai-chi worked well for me but other people find yoga most beneficial. You decide which one (or ones) most interest you. In my case I found that 10 minutes meditation each day began to work wonders.

At my lowest point I was scared to leave the house. If I had to go anywhere, say the shops for example, then I would get very anxious. My stomach would start churning, my legs would go to jelly and I would mentally rehearse the forthcoming trip – worrying about how I would handle it or if I could handle it. My first meditation session was just before one such outing. I was totally amazed at how easily I could reduce my anxiety, almost to the point that I was actually looking forward to going out!

Finally, once you have learned to relax, to ‘let go’, then you must begin to change the way you think and behave. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) will help you to reduce your anxiety and depression by changing your thoughts, behaviour and beliefs. I went to a series of local group sessions where I learnt how early childhood experiences had moulded me into the person I am (was). I learned to challenge my own behaviour and change it so that I no longer reacted badly to stressful situations.

Remember the hardest step to take on a thousand mile journey is the first step. So don’t put it off until tomorrow. Do it now, take that first step on the road to contentment and happiness.