Agoraphobia is that anxiety-based disorder that prevents people from getting away from their safe place. A safe place can be their home, their neighborhood, or a room in their home. Any time they get away from it, anxiety increases sometimes to the point of panic attack.
The anxiety and panic attacks may be connected to one place, person, or situation. This leads the person suffering from agoraphobia to avoid those triggers, increasing the isolation of the disorder.
What Can You Do To Overcome Agoraphobia?
Overcoming agoraphobia may not necessarily mean getting rid of it totally. It may also mean learning to deal with the anxiety and do things to lessen its impact.
Seek Professional Help. In order to have a chance at getting rid of your agoraphobia completely, you probably need professional help. A good therapist to help you get to the root cause of your anxiety and a competent medical professional to prescribe anti-anxiety medication temporarily can help you here.
Learn About Your Disorder. Learning all you can about agoraphobia can help you understand the condition. Understanding is the first step in successfully dealing with it. It can also limit the impact of the anxiety behind agoraphobia.
Get Your Mind Off Yourself. The anxiety associated with agoraphobia and the panic that sometimes accompany it can take up all of your attention. Thinking about the distress you feel and working hard to avoid the people or places that bring it on requires a lot of your focus.
Find someone or something that you can put your attention toward rather than yourself. You might contact local nursing homes to see who would like to have a phone call from you on a regular basis. Contact your church or synagogue to get a list of the shut-ins who could enjoy a friendly call. Find someone who needs you and get involved with them, even over the phone.
Distract Yourself With A New Skill. Learning something new takes time and energy. When you decide to do this, you can spend hours with the new skill, learning what it takes to become good at it. It doesn’t matter what the new skill is, as long as it’s something you can enjoy. Get involved with this, and you can spend hours not thinking about your agoraphobia.
Practice Mindfulness Meditation. This requires you to stay in the moment and not borrow trouble from the future. Staying in the moment means focusing on what’s going on with you right at the immediate moment and not what might happen later. Stay focused on your sensations right now, get deeply immersed in them, and don’t evaluate them. Just pay attention to them. You’ll be surprised how relaxing this experience will become.
Keep in mind all of these things will not cure your agoraphobia, with the exception of seeking professional help. They will help you deal better with the anxiety that is the root cause of your agoraphobia. They may even allow you more freedom than you’ve had before as you continue working with them.
References
Overcome Agoraphobia Learning to Break the Habit of Avoidance http://www.sound-mind.org/overcome-agoraphobia.html#.WVwsi4WcFYc
A Daily Plan for Overcoming Agoraphobia https://psychcentral.com/lib/a-daily-plan-for-overcoming-agoraphobia/