Anyone with success in box breathing
As the session on relaxation said anxious people don’t breathe from there diaphragm, while as far as can remember I have not breathed from my diaphragm for 30 years (at least intentionally). I had seen a CBT therapist before coming to this site while a made progress in that the panic attacks did not bother me as much they still leave me with an on edge felling every day. Since seeing the therapist I started box breathing and as the session said I became dizzy within a few moments. The questions I have are one, I now can box breathe without dizziness but it takes me a while to get results (IE. I have to do it for longer than 5 min), so I am doing anything wrong if I do it for longer than 5 min? Here is my thinking on it, if I do it for longer than 5 min than I am setting myself up for my body or mind to learn that it takes longer than 5 min to reduce symptom. On the other hand if I do it for 5 min and get no result I feel as if I have failed (I know negative thinking). According to my previous CBT I should get to the point where it only takes a few breaths to get rid of anxiety symptoms (again I saw this as a failure because I wasn’t able to achieve a 5 min reduction in symptoms). By doing it longer than 5 min I can some results, which is more than my initial attempts which produced nothing, this gives me some sense of accomplishment. Two my major symptoms are dizziness which was initially caused by starting boxed breathing (as your session suggest), when I have achieved results my body calms down but nothing happens in my head IE. no reduction of pressure or dizziness. My thinking on this is that genesis of my anxiety attacks happened when I lost my hearing and had severe vertigo, so instead of I thinking I going to die of a heart attack, or I am going to faint, I attributed every symptom to my loss of hearing and, consequently my head symptoms are still my main area of attention (I am trying to reduce attention to symptoms in my head). I think this is why I am unable to get a reduction of symptoms in my head because I still give my head symptoms to much power by paying attention and maybe because I am complaining about my lack of ability to reduce symptom in my head this is also giving to much attention and power to the symptoms. So the question is what does it feel like to have success and does your whole body experience it, or is the reduction in symptoms just as personal as an anxiety attack in that it I different for everyone. Three, I seems to have this thought in my head that if I have a lot of symptoms I cannot get rid of them all at once, this is my experience, I get a reduction of symptoms after 5 min then I go longer to get a further reduction, so does a successful person get rid of all symptoms in 5 min, or is it again a personal thing and everyone is different. Finally I am still of session 3 but my old CBT told me do the breathing when I have an attack to stop it, so far I have not noticed this in your plan of dealing with panic attacks, (and unfortunately my CBT said I was supposed to stop attack this in a couple of breaths, and I did for a while but thing changed and then I could not). My negative maladaptive thinking on this is when I have a higher intensity I believe that I cannot stop it with box breathing. Again negative thinking around the attack because I was once able to reduce the attack to moments and not know. (According to him this is the behavioural part of stopping an attack which ignores the cognitive part of it). Perhaps this is a question for one of the educators do you recommend boxed breathing as an behavioural technique during an attack of does it just become a crutch that we would rely on and cause us not to seek out the negative thinking associated with the attack.
Dizzy