How To Overcome Anxiety and Panic Attacks

Let me tell you something that's been driving me absolutely insane for the past two decades as a clinical psychologist: watching doctors hand out benzos and SSRI’s like candy to people experiencing anxiety and panic attacks. Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, Prozac, Lexapro — these aren't solutions. They're handcuffs disguised as medicine.

The story repeats itself with haunting predictability. By the time patients reach my office, the damage is done—months, years, sometimes decades lost to a medical merry-go-round that never stops spinning.

"I had a panic attack, thought I was dying, and rushed to the ER," they tell me, the narrative so familiar I could recite it with them. "After five minutes of questions and a blood pressure check, I walked out with a Xanax prescription and a psychiatrist referral. The psychiatrist spent fifteen minutes with me before deciding I needed daily SSRIs 'to manage my condition.'"

Fast forward two years—they're swallowing pills daily, still experiencing panic attacks, and now shackled with physical dependence that makes stopping feel impossible. Their bodies scream for the very chemicals that were supposed to "fix" them.

But here's the most insidious part: somewhere along this pharmaceutical journey, they've been taught to view their normal human response as a permanent affliction—"my anxiety," they call it, as if they've been cursed with some lifelong monster that lives inside them. They speak of it like an unwelcome roommate they're doomed to accommodate: "My anxiety is really bad today." "My anxiety won't let me do that." This linguistic sleight of hand transforms a temporary emotional state into a core identity, an external force to be feared rather than an internal experience to be understood.

Brilliant work, medical system. You've successfully transformed what could have been resolved in two to eight sessions into a lifelong patient who now believes they're fundamentally broken. Another victory for pharmaceutical dependence, another crushing defeat for actual healing.

I've watched the medical establishment transform one of the most treatable psychological conditions into a lifelong dependency. Panic attacks aren't the mysterious, uncontrollable monsters they're made out to be—they're completely normal physiological responses that have been catastrophically misinterpreted.

In this brutally honest breakdown, I reveal why those benzos and SSRIs are actually reinforcing your anxiety, not relieving it. I'll walk you through the evidence-based techniques that have helped hundreds of my patients break free from panic's grip in as few as 2-8 sessions—no medications required. If you're tired of living in fear of your own body, if you're wondering why those pills aren't actually fixing the problem, or if you suspect there might be a better way forward than chemical dependency—this is the wake-up call you've been waiting for.