Anxiety attacks are no fun at all. You end up with sweaty palms, your heart races and causes palpitations, you can find it hard to breathe and everything is just so overwhelming that you think you are going to explode.

Many General Practitioners will automatically prescribe various drugs ranging from addictive sedatives to anti-depressants and brain inhibitors to help you to cope with anxiety attacks.

All drugs have side effects and these sorts of anxiety treatments can make you dizzy, nauseous, and suffer from many of the same symptoms of an anxiety attack such as a dry mouth and insomnia.

The great news is that there are natural alternatives to drugs when coping with anxiety attacks. Following the ideas below will help you to lessen the severity and incidence of anxiety attacks. These suggestions are all natural, involve putting no chemicals into your body or altering the way the brain naturally works.

You can take some really simple steps to change the way the body reacts when starting to feel anxious or stressed.

In order to understand how these ideas will help you to beat your anxiety attacks naturally, it is good to understand what causes anxiety attacks in the first place.

Generally, anxiety is the body's response to what it sees as a dangerous situation. Anxiety makes us more aware and prepares our bodies to run away from danger by getting the heart beating faster, releasing adrenalin and even drying out the mouth so you don't choke on saliva as you run.

However, if you are not physically in a dangerous situation, anxiety is uncomfortable to endure and is usually caused by your brain giving signals to your body that it is already in danger. How you think will have the greatest impact on whether you have an anxiety attack or not!

Tricks to Trick the Brain

When suffering from an anxiety attack, there are a number of things you can do to help trick your brain into thinking every thing is ok. This will stop your brain from sending the panic signals to your body.

Taking deep breaths will naturally calm the body down. Lack of oxygen is one of the things that makes our bodies naturally panic and prepare to get out of the situation. Taking deep breaths slows us down and helps our bodies get more oxygen too.

Having a drink of water will combat the dry mouth and lump in the throat syndrome automatically because you trick the brain into thinking that saliva is being produced again and therefore the dangerous situation must have gone away.

Change your direction of concentration. Most anxiety attacks are brought on when we think about our fears. For example if we have a fear of spiders, we can continually think about and worry that a spider may be just behind us or behind that picture on the wall. If we keep thinking about spiders, we will start to become anxious and this leads into the anxiety attack.

However, if you start making a phone call, having a conversation with someone, even playing a game or reading a book - anything that makes you concentrate on something other than whatever makes you feel afraid or anxious, you will often be able to redirect your thoughts and not go into an anxiety attack.

General Health

Your general health and well being will have an impact on the severity and incidence of anxiety attacks. If you exercise regularly, for example, you will find that your body is less stressed, you sleep better at night, and you feel better. It is harder to feel anxious when you feel great than when you are overtired and stressed.

Exercise releases the natural chemical in the brain called serotonin, which is also used in antidepressants. Basically, exercising gives your body a natural high which will definitely make it harder to feel anxious.

What you eat will also have an impact on your general health and the levels of anxiety you face. Eating lots of sugar or preservative packed foods can alter the levels of certain hormones that occur naturally in the body. An oversupply of insulin for example can lead to feeling more anxious.

Caffeine, alcohol and any form of drugs all alter the natural chemicals in the brain and make it more likely that you will not sleep as well or could become anxious.

All of the above ideas, exercise, general health, diet, the way you train your brain to think about danger and the ‘brain tricks' will all help reduce the severity and incidence of anxiety attacks you face. You can make a big difference to how much anxiety you experience by just changing a few simple things in your diet for example.

Go ahead - try it. These natural remedies will work!

This article is general in nature and does not represent medical advice. Always consult with a qualified medical practitioner before choosing a course of treatment.