Skills for Coping with Anxiety An anxiety-induced panic attack can have an intense influence on someone's life. Everyday situations can turn into terrifying and terrible events. When panic attacks occur at night, your sleep pattern becomes extremely disrupted. Continuous and recurring attacks will add further tension to an already strained relationship and prevent you from wanting to be involved in any family outings. Persistent diversion from a possible attack will divert your thoughts from the tasks at hand, and often interfere with work and/or school. The fear of reliving an uncomfortable and terrible panic attack can over time prevent you from carrying out required tasks for fear of reliving the embarrassment. Several factors play a role in panic and anxiety attacks. Some are simple daily living skills, such as drug or alcohol use and an unhealthy diet. An anxiety attack, however, can be due to an environmental factor, a lack of a current and previous healthy environment, and could be something that an ancestor passed on through inheritance. Whatever the initial cause, there is hope and help for dealing with anxiety. There are several techniques that are quite efficient and will help you manage the situation until you are able to seek outside help. One of the most helpful things you can do while experiencing an anxiety/panic attack is to talk about it, either talk to yourself or ask a family member to talk to you. Trusting is difficult for those who try to hide their attacks, it is essentially important for you to gain the trust of someone who will give you the encouragement you need to seek help. Although an anxiety attack may feel embarrassing at the time it occurs, you need to remember that you are not the only one going through this. Anxiety and/or panic attacks are not a dirty little secret that you need to hide from your friends and family. It is a medical condition. If you had cancer you would be ashamed to tell anyone?