Sarah Fader Parenting blogger   Posted: 02/02/2014 7:37 pm  I have panic disorder. I manage chronic anxiety every single day. I had my first panic attack when I was 15 years old and (at the time) I had no idea what was going on. I thought I might be having a heart attack. It seemed like a physical problem at first. I had an uncontrollable racing heart followed by sweating and shaking. But then I quickly realized that nervous thoughts were accompanying my physical symptoms. Thankfully, I wasn't alone. Anxiety and depression run in my family, and my mother knew exactly what was going on and how to help…

Turning Panic Disorder on Its Head   If you have ever suffered from panic attacks then you know how terrifying they can be. Your first panic attack came out of nowhere-you suddenly found yourself shaking, trembling with fear, short of breath, feeling like you are going to collapse and then you thought that the end was coming. In my last blog on panic disorder– Do You Have Panic Disorder?– I described the process of developing panic disorder and agoraphobia. In this blog I will describe the steps to reversing this process so that you can live your life free from the fear of panic attacks.

By Melanie A. Greenberg, Ph.D. Calming the mind We all know the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety. Our hearts race, our fingers sweat, and our breathing gets shallow and labored. We experience racing thoughts about a perceived threat that we think is too much to handle. That’s because our “fight or flight” response has kicked in, resulting in sympathetic arousal and a narrowing of attention and focus on avoiding the threat.

Depression and anxiety have very different influences on how we perceive physical symptoms. Christie Nicholson reports Past studies have shown that something called “negative affect” (which is an overall smorgasbord of anger, sadness, fear, irritation, etc.) causes us to inflate the number of physical symptoms we feel. But recent research from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has found that individual emotions—like depression and anxiety—have very different influences on our perceived physical symptoms.

  Psychiatric Times. APA CONFERENCE  By Arline Kaplan | May 24, 2011 Patients with anxiety disorders who self-medicate with alcohol(Drug information on alcohol) or drugs may be increasing their risk for developing incident substance use disorders, according to a study presented at the American Psychiatric Association’s recent annual meeting. Jennifer Robinson, who is working on her PhD in clinical psychology and is a research associate for the department of psychiatry from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, told APA attendees that anxiety disorders and substance use disorders are common comorbidities as determined by clinical and community-based research and that comorbidity results in increased mental health treatment utilization,more severe symptomatology,…