Agoraphobia: 7 Keys to Freedom

Agoraphobia is the fear of open or public places, and can turn life into a waking nightmare. You are afraid to leave your house and you live in constant fear of the next panic attack. Your heart beats out of control. You feel like you can’t catch your breath. You sweat and you shake. You live every day wondering if you are dying or going crazy.

Agoraphobia can literally stop your life, vastly limit your ability to function at school or work, and take away your freedom to do the things you enjoy or spend time with the people you love.

If you suffer from agoraphobia, there are two things you should know right now.

First, you are not alone. Approximately 3.2 million Americans live in the shadow of agoraphobia.

Second, there is HOPE for recovery from agoraphobia. In fact, there are proven techniques to successfully treat agoraphobia – even without professional help. In fact, 90% of people with agoraphobia who practice cognitive-behavioral therapy experience significant improvement in just 12-16 weeks.

I know this because I lived through the pain of agoraphobia – and recovered. Based on my personal experience with agoraphobia and my master’s degree in psychology, here are 7 Keys to Freedom from Agoraphobia:

1. Develop a relaxation reflex. Condition yourself to associate a state of total body relaxation with a cue word. Then, when a panic attack strikes, you can say your cue word and your body will respond with relaxation.
2. Take baby steps. Overcoming your fears can seem overwhelming, but not if you take it one small step at a time. You can unlearn the fear response with a technique called systematic desensitization, which involves facing your fears in small increments. This technique, according to research, is the most powerful way to treat agoraphobia.
3. Find a purpose greater than your fear. It can be hard to find the motivation to do the hard work of recovery from agoraphobia, but not if you find a passion in life that makes fear irrelevant.
4. Change the diet of your mind. Become intentional about replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. Practicing positive thoughts will be like taking an emotional vitamin that will keep your mind from getting sick (with fear).
5. Change the pictures in your mind.  Harnessing the creative power of your imagination and making it work for you is a key to freedom from agoraphobia. Since the right brain can’t tell the actual from the imagined, by changing the pictures in your mind, you can change the picture of your real life.
6. Transform worry into powerful source of motivation to take action. Worry is a state when your mind is in action and your body is not. The trick to overcoming worry is to reverse the equation, and to get your body into action. When you take action in the present moment, worry tends to fade.
7. Take responsibility for your own recovery. My real recovery from agoraphobia began when I stopped looking all around me for the answer and looked inside myself. I made the decision to stop expecting someone or something to fix me and took responsibility for my own recovery. The day I made this decision I was on the road to freedom from agoraphobia.

Recovery from agoraphobia is just a matter of having reliable information and applying it on a consistent basis. That’s all that stands between you and freedom – between the prison of agoraphobia and the ability to live a healthy, meaningful and fulfilling life.