Rebekah: Hey guys.
It’s Bex here and I’m here again with my wonderful friend Grace Smith from GraceSmithTV.com.
A lot of you already know her because you’ve been watching videos of us together where
she has been hypnotizing us and we’ve been having lots of fun conversations.
But today we’re doing something a little bit different, which was not anticipated.
Grace: Yes.
Rebekah: Grace showed up to make the videos today and she almost didn’t because I almost
had to cancel because I had my first panic attack in probably, I don’t know, 10 plus
years, a real serious one where I felt like I was going to die.
Grace: Yeah.
Rebekah: So we’re going to talk about that today, panic attacks.
Grace: Definitely.
Everything happens for a reason.
So who knows?
Maybe your three minutes of hell happened so that you can help everybody else.
Rebekah: You’re welcome for my panic attack.
Grace: Be very grateful for this moment.
Panic attacks are actually quite common within my practice, meaning that a lot of people
have sought me out because they’ve had panic attacks before.
If you’ve ever experienced that, you know how terrifying it is.
The onset of a panic attack can precipitate future ones simply because you’re so afraid
that it will happen again, that it actually brings it on.
So what we do in hypnosis to help people feel safe that either the panic attack will not
come back, we actually walk the client through a panic attack in hypnosis.
Rebekah: So how does someone know if they’re having a panic attack?
Because I didn’t know what to call it for so many years before someone told me, “Oh,
that’s a panic attack.
That’s exactly what you’re having.”
Grace: Right.
I think that there – everybody might define high anxiety in the beginning of a panic attack
a little bit differently.
But ultimately, if you can feel high anxiety and function throughout your day, if you’re
at work and the stresses are just mounting but you’re still able to do the basics of
what you need to do, I would define that as high anxiety.
Rebekah: OK.
Grace: But if you get to the point where you’re not functioning, where you’re thinking about
canceling or you are canceling or you can’t get up off the ground or you’re sobbing,
you can’t participate in your daily life requirements, that would be absolutely a panic
attack.
Then of course there’s a spectrum of just being terrified for three minutes and feeling
that pounding up to – some of my clients have – they needed to be hospitalized before
they come to me.
Rebekah: So I will say quickly that today’s panic attack only lasted for three minutes.
But the ones that I used to have before I started the meditation practice, before I
did years of therapy, would last for days or they would put me out of commission for
days where I had to sleep afterwards.
I was out of energy.
So it’s not that – you know, what I do because I know that you guys know that I teach
meditation and I teach you how to reduce stress in your life, in your daily life.
It’s not that that necessarily cured me of my anxiety but it helps me manage it.
So when I do have an attack, it was three minutes and I was done.
Grace: That you will never feel stressed again and the fact of the matter is that’s highly
unlikely and highly unrealistic.
But if you could go from being out of commission for days because your adrenaline spiked so
much during the three-minute panic attack to the point where you haven’t had one and
you can’t even remember how long and when you did, it was three minutes long and then
you knew how to mitigate those symptoms.
Rebekah: Right.
Grace: Isn’t it worth the meditation practice just for that?
Rebekah: Right.
Grace: It’s not that the meditation or the hypnosis or whatever didn’t work.
It’s that life is challenging.
Rebekah: And it changes every day and there’s going to be all new circumstances that we
encounter that we’ve never encountered before.
So we’re going to have different reactions.
It’s about being prepared for those reactions and then how to manage those reactions when
you’re in it.
Grace: Absolutely.
So one of the things that we do in a hypnosis session is we have you walk through what the
process of your particular panic attack was.
Now you can use this for just anxiety.
Well, the panic attack is usually very clear.
For most people, it’s something along the lines of the heart starts to race.
The stomach gets queasy.
The hands get clammy and then it’s sort of like a blackout or a whiteout or something
then happens in the brain space.
So when you’re in hypnosis, you are going to go through those feelings and because you’re
in hypnosis, you’re safe.
You’re actually deeply relaxed.
You’re just imagining that it’s happening and then you do the same thing in reverse.
So you would clear the brain.
So you start thinking clearly.
You would turn off the sweating palms.
You would make the stomach calm and you would slow the heartbeat and in hypnosis you’re
able to imagine yourself doing this and you do it enough times that the brain begins to
believe I am the one in control.
So God forbid something happens in life that were unexpected, that is unexpected that we
don’t see coming, that there’s a part of your brain.
There’s a synapse in your brain that believes even if that were to happen, I know how to
turn it off which oftentimes it’s enough to keep it from happening in the first place.
Rebekah: Because we love you guys so much, when we were talking about this, there is
going to be a follow-up video to this that I highly suggest that you watch and will be
published next week.
But if you want to see it ahead of time, all you have to do is sign up for my newsletter
and I will give you the link to that.
But we want to offer you something that’s actually going to help and a lot of times,
we can do that in just a few minutes in a video.
I might offer you a meditation or Grace will offer a hypnosis session.
But today we would really like you to go over to the link.
That’s going to be in the video description and you will find out so much more about hypnosis
and about hypnosis for stress relief and anxiety in particular with Grace and we will fix you
up.
We’re going to help you out but in a real way that’s lasting and true.
Grace: Yeah, it’s very, very powerful.
It’s really going to put your mind at ease especially if you’ve experienced the panic
attack before.
Even if you haven’t, just that you feel even more sure that you might be able to not
make that a part of your life experience.
Rebekah: Yeah, all of us from time to time feel a little bit of anxiety, whether it’s
small or big, and managing it is a beautiful thing.
Why suffer at all when we could figure out a way to not?
Grace: Absolutely, when you have a choice.
Rebekah: Thank you guys for joining us today.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section below the
video.
We would love to hear more from you and give us requests because we love making these videos
for you and we will both see you very soon.