Public speaking for people who suffer from panic attacks or general anxiety often becomes a major source of worry weeks or even months before the speaking event is to occur... So how should a person with an anxiety issue tackle public speaking? Stage one is accepting that all these bizarre and quite frankly unnerving sensations are not going to go away overnight.

You know the saying that "what you resist, persists." Well that saying applies perfectly to fear. If you resist a situation out of fear, the fear around that issue will persist. How do you stop resisting–you move directly into it, into the path of the anxiety, and by doing so it cannot persist. In essence what this means is that if you daily voluntarily seek to have a panic attack, you cannot have one. Try in this very moment to have a panic attack and I will guarantee you cannot. You may not realize it but you have always decided to panic. You make the choice by saying this is beyond my control.

You are probably well aware that a panic attack is a 'fight or flight' response to a perceived threat. The reason the human brain responds like this goes back to our prehistoric past where humans needed their bodies to respond quickly to a perceived physical threat. What this new research is telling us, is that people's mental activity during a panic attack is suddenly moving to the mid brain, resulting in the heightened state of fear and panic... In order to restore calm you therefore need the brain's mental activity to change.