Stop Panic Attacks By Starting Your Day Right

January 20, 2009 by Alex
Filed under: Anxiety Disorders, Panic Attack Help, Personal

Do you ever have one of those days when you have no self control and no discipline? Maybe on those days you eat lots of junk and have no nutritious food. Maybe you get up late and stay up late. Maybe you skip that trip to the gym you were planning, or conveniently forget to take that walk through the park you had planned.

You might see a pattern here. On those days when you have no self control and no discipline, you usually end up behaving in ways that damage your health and your mental health.

I used to do this all the time, and I know it was a big factor in my anxiety. It didn’t cause my anxiety, but I know it made it worse. And I know it made it harder to stop.

Do you know what the crazy thing is? I discovered that I could stop all that bad behavior, all that lack of discipline and self control, by doing one thing.

Yep, just a single thing.

And the one thing I changed was to start each day healthily - and I mean healthily in every way you can imagine: psychologically, nutritionally, and emotionally.

Let me tell you where this idea came from.

I was listening to an interview with a fitness expert a couple of years back, and he was being asked what the most important thing was for someone trying to lose weight.

His answer?

To start the day right. He was talking specifically about breakfast. His opinion was that when you begin the day with a highly nutritious and healthy breakfast you are far less likely to slip up during the rest of the day and do anything to ruin the great start you gave yourself at breakfast.

The moment I heard this it sparked something in my mind. I knew he was right. I knew from my own experience that on days when I’d slip up at breakfast and give in to something tasty and unhealthy that I almost always went on to eat a lot more crap throughout the day.

I would justify it by telling myself that I’d already slipped up, so a perfect day was now beyond me. “I’ll start again in the morning,” I’d tell myself, giving myself permission to do anything I wanted for the rest of the day, no matter how unhealthy it was for me.

I also knew from experience that on days when I started out right, when I actually ate a healthy breakfast, I would usually turn down junk food for the rest of the day because I didn’t want to spoil the good start that I’d made.

So how does all this stuff affect anxiety and panic?

Well, just like I knew that I sometimes started the day badly nutritionally and caused myself to misbehave with food all day, I also knew that I often slipped up emotionally and psychologically in the mornings. And on those occasions, I’d often go on to have terrible days, with many panic attacks, massive depression, and a generally lousy mood.

Suddenly I realised that those terrible days all began with a terrible start to my day. And more importantly, I realised that those terrible starts were within my control.

As soon as this dawned on me, I began making a conscious effort each morning to avoid anything negative: no unhealthy food; no contact with negative people; no arguments with friends and family members, no matter how bad a mood I found myself in; no depressing TV news; no lying in bed for 30 minutes or longer dreading the day.

Nothing negative. Period.

If there were things I considered negative that I had to deal with, then I would make sure to tackle them later in the day, preferably in the afternoon.

The crazy thing is, this started to work miracles after just a few days. Those terrible days I used to have so often? They vanished. And this got addictive. The better I started my days in the mornings, the better the day I would go on to have. So I would suddenly find myself trying to improve the quality of the first hour of my day after I woke up.

In the beginning I was just trying to avoid negativity, but after a few weeks I was eating healthy foods I’d never even tried before. I started getting up earlier than I’d ever got up before. I started walking a mile or more. Then I started jogging. Then I started running, and all this in those first 60 minutes after I’d wake up.

These simple changes that I made to the first hour of my day have made as big an impact in my life as anything else ever has. And that’s why I’ve written about it tonight. I wanted to share with you the amazing things that can happen to you and your anxiety by simply starting your day right.

And I hope I’ve written about it in a way that excites you, the same way the idea excited me when I first heard about it.

Why not give it a try yourself?

Tomorrow, do one small thing that improves the quality of the first hour of your day. And stick with it for a week. See what happens. Then add another improvement to your first hour, and then another, and another.

Baby steps get you there too, eventually.

Do me a favour and let me know what you think about this idea. And better still, come back in a few weeks and tell me the results you’ve been getting. I would love to hear how it’s changed your life!

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