Tim Maude Hypnotherapy

Tag: #anxiety

  • The Perfectionist’s Dilemma

    The Perfectionist’s Dilemma

    Being a perfectionist is a noble ideal, but be warned … it can feed your anxiety. Anxiety comes from too much stress, and too much stress can come from always seeking an unobtainable life.

    A perfectionist wants everything to be perfect; their home has to be perfect; their job has to be done perfectly; their life has to be exactly as they want it to be. And of course, in one way, it’s good to strive for the best. You will never get the best results if you don’t strive for them.

    The problem comes when we don’t get the perfect life we want … and, by the way … we rarely do. We may strive for everything to be just right, but there is always someone who spoils it (not out of malice, it’s just that they don’t have the same longing for perfection). Or maybe you run out of time or money to get it to the perfect state you want it to be in.

    Imagine the couple preparing to get married. They want a perfect wedding. They spend months saving and planning, booking rooms, planning guest lists and all the other things that go to make a great wedding. It is already stressful, trying to get everything ready by a fixed deadline. And when the great day arrives, something goes wrong – maybe it rains during the formal photography session outside in the rose garden, or Uncle Jack turns up late and interrupts the wedding vows. The frustration just adds to the ever increasing stress levels. And the stress can lead to anxiety.

    And so we have the perfectionist’s dilemma: Ever striving to achieve unobtainable perfection leads to stress, disappointment and anxiety, whereas making do with a lesser goal does not achieve what you really want.

    The solution to the perfectionist’s dilemma is to accept the simple fact that:

    Good enough is good enough.

    You can still strive for perfection, but you need to accept that it will not always be achieved. And if you don’t achieve it, is what you have achieved good enough … good enough to work … good enough for you to be satisfied? When you can accept that it is good enough, life becomes calmer and you are less likely to become anxious.

    If you struggle to control you anxiety and want help, you might want to see what hypnotherapy can do. I work from my clinic here in Fleet (or over Zoom if you live further away). Contact me when you need help getting you life back together.

    Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

  • FOMO Induced Anxiety

    FOMO Induced Anxiety

    In 2004, in an article for the Harvard Business School, Patrick J McGinnis coined a new word – FOMO – the Fear of Missing Out. Simply put, FOMO is the fear that other people are getting something that you are not – so you are missing out. Since McGinnis first coined the term, there has been a growing realisation of how important FOMO is – and in particular, its impact on anxiety, depression and other mental disorders.

    FOMO has become far more prevalent in the age of social media, and it works like this …

    Jo has lots of friends on social media. When her friends do something interesting or exciting, they post about it. Jo also follows several good looking social media influencers. These influencers get lots of photos taken of themselves (and, believe me, they have trained themselves to pose so that they look really good). They choose the best photos to publish. Jo also follows other people who have really interesting hobbies and publish photos of the highlights.

    So Jo is bombarded with pictures, videos and other posts which are all exciting – the people sho follows at their best. She spends several hours every day keeping up with all her friends and those she follows.

    Now Jo compares her life with the lives she sees on her phone. Her own life is filled with a lot of drab, boring times and just a few exciting or interesting times. Her own appearance looks dull and boring when compared with the beautiful pictures that the influencers post.

    So by making this comparison, Jo’s life and looks are way down the scale when compared with all the highlights – the very best of the lives and the best of the pictures – that she sees on her phone. And this comparison, even though it may be entirely unconscious, creates stress – it creates a fear of missing out. Maybe she is not doing enough. Maybe she should look more like the influencers. More stress … more anxiety.

    There is a skill to becoming content with who you are and what you are doing with your life. When you compare yourself and your life to what you see on social media, you are always going to be disappointed. FOMO has become the mental disorder of the Internet Age.

    So ask yourself a few questions:

    How much time do I spend on social media each day? (You phone may have a “screen time” monitor that will tell you this.)
    Is that time well spent?
    Would you be better off or worse off spending less time on your phone?
    On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy does being on social media make you?
    How content are you just to be happy with who you really are?

    If you are still struggling making the changes that you need to, and you want some help, then you can always contact me. Here in my clinic in Fleet, I help people who are only just coping with anxiety and stress. I use hypnotherapy to help them regain control in their lives.

    Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

  • Police trailing hypnotherapy for anxiety

    Police trailing hypnotherapy for anxiety

    I am really pleased to see Northumbria Police trialing Solution Focused Hypnotherapy to assist with officers and staff with anxiety and depression – and getting an 80% success rate. This is a brilliant example of an independent review of the techniques I use in my clinic every week.

    https://www.peterboroughmatters.co.uk/news/23145061.police-plan-mental-health-hypnotherapy-scheme-roll/

    Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

  • Ground Control to Major Tom

    Ground Control to Major Tom

    If you are as old as me, you might just remember the song “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. Major Tom is an astronaut whose spaceship goes wrong, and instead of panicking when he can’t do anything, he just looks down at planet Earth and admires the blue colour that he can see.

    The song starts, “Ground Control to Major Tom”, and it this ground control that I want to talk about today.

    Grounding is a useful technique to learn if you suffer from panic attacks. During a panic attack, the primitive part of your brain takes over and puts you into a full blown fight-or-flight mode – even though there is nothing dangerous around. When you are in full fight-or-flight mode, the primitive part of the brain starts to close down anything that is not associated with fighting or running – including the thinking part of your brain. You literally start to find it difficult to think. This loss of control can be very frightening.

    There are various techniques you can learn to do that help you regain control and make the experience less frightening. These are known as “grounding”. They don’t immediately remove the panic attack, but they do shorten its intensity and duration.

    5-4-3-2-1 Senses

    The idea is that you look, feel, listen etc around you and name things out loud (if possible, or just in your head if not)

    Name 5 things you can see e.g. “Tree, car, man, road, sky”
    Name 4 things you can feel e.g. “Wall, hand, nose, shirt”
    Name 3 things you can hear e.g. “Car engine, people talking, someone laughing”
    Name 2 things you can smell e.g. “Car exhaust, perfume”
    Name 1 thing you can taste e.g. “Saliva”

    You can repeat this as often as you need to.

    Explain the panic attack to yourself

    Just talk to yourself (again, out loud if possible, but if not, then just in your own head). Tell yourself what is going on, for example:

    “I am having a panic attack. A lot of people have panic attacks. It is just the fight-or-flight part of my brain getting things wrong, because it is not an intelligent part of the brain – it is very primitive. The panic attack will last a short while and then everything will return to normal. When I return to normal very soon now, I will be able to get on with my everyday life.”

    Play the Alphabet Game

    The alphabet game is all about naming countries, animals, towns, foodstuffs, or any other category, starting with A, then B and so on. For example if you chose the category of countries, you might say:

    “Albania, Belgium, Canada, D – I can’t think of anything beginning with D, Egypt, Finland …”

    And you can see that if you can’t think of anything for one letter – just move on.

    And finally

    The point about grounding is that you do something to regain control of the thinking part of your brain. If you do suffer from panic attacks, it is worth choosing one of these methods and practising at a time when you do Not have a panic attack. When you get used to the technique, it will be so much easier to put into practice when your detect a panic attack creeping up on you.

    In the song “Space Oddity”, Major Tom’s spaceship goes wrong and he cannot do anything. His response is a classic grounding technique – he looked at the Earth and noticed the colours he could see there.

    If you cannot manage your anxiety on your own, you may like to consider getting help. In my clinic in Fleet, I help people with anxiety. I use solution-focused hypnotherapy to help them get back in control of their lives and get rid of the unwanted symptoms.

    References

    https://genius.com/David-bowie-space-oddity-lyrics
    https://keepingwellncl.nhs.uk/resource/grounding-techniques/
    Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

  • A glass of wine to take the edge of it?

    A glass of wine to take the edge of it?

    Are you one of the many people who have a glass of wine or a beer after a stressful day, just to “take the edge off it”? Be warned that for those of you with anxiety, alcohol may actually make the situation worse.

    Alcohol is a depressant – this doesn’t mean that it makes you depressed; it means that the parts of your brain and body stop working as efficiently as usual. We all know that that part of your brain that puts a brake on stupid behaviour is suppressed – so you start to loose your inhibitions. After a few drinks, your ability to speak clearly and at the right volume becomes effected. And you probably know all the other things that happen to you. It’s all because alcohol winds back the functioning of some parts of the brain.

    If you drink regularly, the brain gets used to the effects of the alcohol and starts to change in order to compensate. This means that when you don’t get a drink one evening, the primitive part of your brain recognises that something is different from usual, and starts to enter the fight-or-flight mode. If you are used to having a glass of wine when you get home from work, you might notice increased tension on the day when you don’t get a drink – that’s the primitive part of the brain starting to engage.

    Alcohol also has an effect on the chemicals in the brain, in particular it decreases the production of a neurotransmitter called GABA. One of GABA’s roles is to regulate the other neurotransmitter chemical so as to decrease anxiety and other mental health issues. This is one of the reasons why alcohol can lead to emotional and mental health issues.

    Surprisingly, alcohol does not help you get a good night’s sleep. Alcohol may make you sleepy, but it acts more like a sedative than natural sleep. This means that the dreaming phase of your sleep does not work properly, particularly during the early parts of the night when the alcohol is still active in the bloodstream. As dreaming is one of the main natural ways the brain has to deal with the stresses of the day, this has a big negative impact on anxiety.

    How many drinks you have and how often is up to you. You need to make your own judgement. The take home message from this blog is simple – a glass of wine may take the edge of the stress you are under, but it will not do anything for your overall anxiety levels, and may make them worse.

    Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash

  • When getting distracted is a good thing

    When getting distracted is a good thing

    How often do you find yourself supposedly getting on with some job or other, and finding yourself distracted doing something else? Maybe you have a job that you have been putting off because it’s a bit boring, and you just check your social media before you start … 2 hours later you are still on social media and have not started the job yet!

    Getting distracted is not a good thing when you have jobs to do. The brain has a natural tendency to focus on something interesting rather than doing something boring, and so distraction is often a big problem in getting boring stuff done.

    The good news is that we can use this natural tendency to stop our anxieties and worries rearing their head. Anxiety occurs in different ways in different people, and one of the most common ways is worry. We worry about the things that could go wrong, and it seems to go round and round in our heads without ever resolving itself.

    Worry is nature’s way of getting you to do something about a potential problem. If you worry about failing your exams, that worry encourages you to study more. If you worry about being late for work, it encourages you to run for the bus. Once you have done something about it – there is not need to worry. But for some people the worry continues going round and round in their heads, even though they have done everything they can.

    And that is where distraction comes in. A very simple way to regain control of a worrying mind is to distract it. Find something that absorbs you – whether it is reading a book, watching a film or going down to the gym.

    So if you worry about the car breaking down – make sure it is fully serviced and then you have done all you can. So if you find yourself worrying about it after that, just distract yourself. Do something that absorbs your brain into doing something else – whether it is doing the crossword, going out for a coffee with friends, or washing the car.

    If you cannot manage your anxiety on your own, you may like to consider getting help. In my clinic in Fleet, I help people with anxiety. I use solution-focused hypnotherapy to help them get back in control of their lives and get rid of the unwanted symptoms.

    Photo by Ethan Sexton on Unsplash