Five tips for immediate help in emergency situations

October 10th is World Mental Health Day every year. Anxiety disorders are the most frequently diagnosed mental illness in Germany. Are you affected too?

Stress can be a good thing. Our body is put into an alert state, allowing for faster reactions. Stress is also an advantage in exam situations: the brain works faster and with greater concentration and the chances of being able to remember material learned a long time ago increase. In the short term, stress is not harmful to the body. Things look different when it becomes chronic. Sleep disturbances, irritability, nervous restlessness, and back pain are possible signs that you are not relaxing enough.

Chronic stress also promotes a number of mental illnesses. These are increasingly being diagnosed. This is what the post shows KKH Commercial Health Insurance Company, Which Absences due to mental illness increased by 85 percent from the first half of 2022 to the first half of 2023 – higher than at any time in the recent past. Depression, adjustment disorders, and anxiety disorders: Employees are increasingly taking sick leave due to mental illness.

Anxiety Disorders: Immediate Help for Panic Attacks – Five Effective Tips for Emergency Situations

Anxiety disorders are the most common form of mental illness among all segments of the population. Examples of this include panic attacks or fear of large spaces. But there are ways to reduce your risk of developing anxiety disorders and act immediately in emergency situations. According to what he published AOK Baden-Württemberg In such situations, those affected can act as follows and thus provide immediate assistance to themselves:

1. Talk to yourself: To reduce feelings of anxiety in acute situations, it helps to calm yourself with soothing thoughts and phrases. So say to yourself something like: “It’s okay for me to have a panic attack. I’m not alone in this. Other people feel this way, too.”
2. Radically accepted: If you accept your panic attack, you create space for change. Radical acceptance initially calms the situation because you no longer have to fight it.
3. Do breathing exercises: If a person panics, his breathing automatically becomes shallower. However, breathing deeply in and out can calm you down. For example, the 4-6-8 technique can be helpful: inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for six seconds, then exhale for eight seconds.
4. He distracts himselfDistraction can also help with a panic attack. Therefore, focus on other things, for example, counting down or reading visual objects of a certain color.
5. Emergency kit for panic attacks: This bag or box should contain things that can get you out of the strong feeling of anxiety and regulate stress. For example, pleasant music, a pleasant smell, or slight painful stimuli by pulling and releasing an elastic band on the wrist are suitable for this purpose. These things can bring you back into the situation, put you in the present and put the trigger sending the fear signal into perspective.

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