How to Help a Family Member With Anxiety and Panic Attacks - How Can You Help With Panic Attacks?

If you've been wondering how to help a family member with anxiety and panic attacks but didn't know where to go, continue reading on to get some easy tips to help out your suffering family member.

Anxiety with panic attacks are very commonplace today, so the odds are pretty high that you will know someone affected with an anxiety disorder at some point, and knowing how you can help them is a great tool you can have.

If a member of your family is increasingly becoming more anxious, obsessive or agoraphobic, which is just a fear of being in a place where the person may think it will be hard to escape, then it will really help the both of you to know some signs of panic attacks so that you will be more apt to know when he/she is having one.

So, a family member is saying they are feeling anxious, or they are already having a full-blown panic attack. They may be experiencing some of these more common symptoms.

Common anxiety attack symptoms:

Fear of dying

Nausea

Numbness or tingling sensations

Racing heart

Shaking (visibly or internally)

Dizziness

There are many more symptoms of panic, but these seem to be the most common among sufferers. The fear of dying is the most frightening for most anxiety sufferers, because all of the other sensations they are feeling combine in their body.

When an anxious person feels these effects together, their mind forms a very real opinion that they are indeed, dying of something. This can be really scary for your loved one, so it is important to try as best you can to comfort and calm them during these episodes of extreme panic.

What can you do to help?

One of the best things you can do for your family member is to try to get them calm. Remember, they think that they are really dying of something, so if you offer to do whatever you can for them in order to calm them down you are helping them a lot.

Listen to them.

While this seems easy, it can be tough for many people fully empathize with an anxiety sufferer many times. Your family member is going to have thoughts and ideas that can be considered irrational when compared to the thoughts and fears of a non-anxious person.

It is important to set that aside, and simply listen to them if they need to talk about their panic attack episodes. Not every sufferer is the same, so many do not want to focus and obsess about their panic and talk about it, but most do it seems.

Most of all, you can learn how to help a family member with anxiety and panic attacks by having empathy for them as they go through a very tough time in their lives.