What has helped me to not fear my anxiety acting up are two things: One, allowing/accepting its existence in my life as a source of information and Two, learning about how anxiety attacks are just the body and mind's fight or flight response to a perceived danger. That's literally all anxiety is, just your body and brain trying to ready you to protect you from danger. Every symptom of an attack is just that........heart rate increasing, breath getting shallow, tension in muscles, trembling, sweating, feeling hot, digestive problems, etc.. That's ALL IT IS. Once you believe the scientific facts about that, it helps tremendously when you have anxiety, because you see it totally differently.
A better (more helpful to you) question would be to compassionately and curiously wonder to yourself about what triggered your body's fight or flight response (what was the perceived danger that set it off) in the store? It may have been something external, in the store, or something internal (dead end, irrational thoughts in your mind in the store) that made your brain think you were in some kind of danger and set off your body's fight or flight response.
For some reason, we people with anxiety disorders seem to have a heightened sensitivity to perceived danger and our fight or flight responses are triggered more easily. For me, that came as the result of a traumatic childhood, and medication has calmed it down to the point where I can make us of cognitive restructuring and deep breathing and mindfulness to calm myself down and try to find out what the perceived danger was that set it off. Once you know that, you can work with it to help yourself to realize you were not actually in danger in the store.
A lot of this I got from doing "Conquer Your Anxiety". It's a cd/workbook program that has helped me so much with my anxiety. You can find it online if you are interested.
You first need to deal with the physical symptoms of the fight or flight response before you can think logically, so don't stand there in the middle of a panic attack and ask yourself what the danger is, bec your brain is actually changed in the middle of a fight or flight reaction to perceive everything as dangerous. You need to do physically calming things, like you did and also deep breathing, progressive relaxation, physical activity and mind distraction activities, until you are out of fight or flight mode, and the part of your brain that can think logically has adequate blood flow again. Then you can compassionately curiously ponder what may have triggered it and you will learn oodles about yourself that will help you to prevent and deal with anxiety in the future.
