When anxiety strikes, it is sometimes difficult to imagine a positive future, and yet that is what I ask my clients to consider. It is hard to have a smile, have a laugh, and enjoy each moment. And yet it is possible to get there.
Anxiety is a natural response to threats. In a dangerous world, our survival instinct clocks in. If there is potential danger nearby, that instinct makes us anxious, and the anxiety makes us look out for the danger. When anxiety strikes, we start focusing on all the things that might go wrong.
Focusing on things that can go wrong in times of danger is part of our survival instinct. It is this instinct that kept our ancestors safe when the world was a more dangerous place. In most of the world, there are few life-threatening dangers these days, and yet our survival instinct still activates.
Our survival instinct is only concerned with keeping us alive; it does not care how we feel. It does not care that being filled with anxiety is not a nice place to be. It does not understand that, in this modern world, being filled with anxiety severely hampers what we are able to achieve.
So I ask my clients not to focus on the things that could go wrong in their lives; I ask them to focus on what life will be like when it all goes right. I ask them to focus on enjoying life. If you suffer from anxiety, you will realise how hard this is to do. That is why hypnotherapy is so useful in helping to break the vicious cycle of anxiety and worry.
If you can, when anxiety strikes, focus your mind on what you can enjoy in that very moment, and also what a successful future would look like.
And Finally …
If you have difficulty in managing your anxiety by yourself, you might like to Contact Me. I help people with anxiety by using hypnotherapy to break the anxiety vicious cycle. I work from my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire and also online.
Photo courtesy of Nicola Crichton at the Mental Health Foundation