[lady411]

So my maternal grandmother suffered from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder since my mom was 10 yrs old. The past year my mother has been dealing with full on panic attacks and anxiety due to the stress of a medical condition. Two of her brothers have been battling the same thing for a few yrs now.
I have sat down with her and gone over some mental strategies & breathing exercises that she can do to deescalate an attack. Sometimes i just call her to hear her out and she tells me that it soothes her to just conversate with me. But a lot of times I feel useless in alleviating her stress & anxiety.

What are some other things i can do to help her?

[Skeezyks]

Take a look at this description of the practice of "compassionate abiding" & see if it might be of some benefit:

https://mindsetdoc.wordpress.com/201...e-abiding-101/

Also, a psychiatrist once told me that using the hands & fingers requires a large amount of the brain's capacity. So if one is feeling depressed & / or anxious, if one can find something to do with one's hands & fingers, it will help to keep the depression & anxiety from spreading further throughout the brain. I don't know if it's true. But that's what she told me.

By the way... I'm going on 70 years old! And I struggle with anxiety as well. I spend a lot of time on-line... (much of it here on PC!) And I know that doing so helps to keep my anxiety level at bay.

Of course, I don't know how old your mother is. But if there were some sort of group she could join where she would have the opportunity to interact with others on a regular basis, this might help too. From my perspective, it's certainly good to have some "tools" one can use to deescalate when an anxiety attack happens. But it's much better to figure out some things one can do to reduce one's overall level of anxiety to begin with so that perhaps one is not experiencing anxiety attacks to begin with... or at least not so many.

Here are links to some articles, from PsychCentral's archives on the subjects of supporting someone who is having a panic or anxiety attack along with tips on how to reduce anxiety. Perhaps some of the information in them will be of some help:

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/menta...ks-or-anxiety/

https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-to...-with-anxiety/

https://psychcentral.com/blog/do-you...-panic-attack/

https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-smal...iety-symptoms/

https://psychcentral.com/lib/9-ways-...ere-right-now/

https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-to...being-anxious/

I wish you both well...