Tag: #anxiety

I see many people with high levels of anxiety every week in my clinic. When I ask them what they want from hypnotherapy, a very common answer is, “I want to feel normal.” They don’t ask to be cured of anxiety … they just want to be normal.

What Is Anxiety For?

For the majority of mentally healthy people, anxiety occurs in their life occasionally. This is quite normal, because anxiety is a natural mechanism that humans have to help them avoid danger. It is a survival instinct.

Imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors. When they went out looking for food, there might be danger around them – dangerous animals, enemy tribes, poisonous mushrooms, steep cliffs … and so on. To be anxious in a dangerous world is a sensible thing to do, because anxiety draws your attention to the things that might be dangerous.

If our ancestors heard a noise, their anxiety would make them stop and ask themselves – is the noise something dangerous? The anxiety would make them worried about moving into unfamiliar areas or trying unfamiliar foods. Anxiety made them think of all the things that might go wrong. It was, and still is, our survival instinct.

So anxiety has some use. If we lived in a dangerous world, then it would be very important. But in most (not all) places in the world, what goes on around us is generally fairly safe.

So Why Do People Get Anxious In Safe Situations?

The primitive part of your brain responsible for generating anxiety, the limbic system, is not particularly clever. It learns patterns and sticks to them. It is not concerned with how you feel; it is just concerned with keeping you alive. It can become over-sensitive and then trigger anxiety over little things. In the extreme, it can trigger anxiety as soon as you wake up in the morning, and keep it going all day.

This limbic system in our brain acts independently to your thoughts, but it can influence your thoughts. I can make you worry about all the things that might possibly go wrong, however unlikely, and it can just create a feeling of anxiety without any thoughts at all.

Anxiety is a safe situation is simply the limbic system in the brain being over-sensitive and creating anxiety when there is no need to be anxious.

Can You Cure Anxiety?

You don’t want to eliminate anxiety all together, as it can be a useful survival mechanism when you do occasionally need it. What you want to do is to calm it down, so that you are only anxious when it is appropriate to be so.

The clients I see have anxiety levels way above what I would consider to be “normal” or “healthy”. The anxiety they have is out of proportion to the levels that are appropriate. So I do not “cure” them of anxiety, I simply help them get their anxiety levels back to an appropriate and healthy level.

Hypnotherapy For Anxiety

I use hypnotherapy to help my clients get their anxiety under control. This is not the only thing that can help people. However, it is very effective. I love to use solution-focused hypnotherapy, which does not dig into the past to try to explore where the anxiety came from. I do not really care where the anxiety came from. I am more concerned with where my clients are going to. In this way I can use hypnotherapy to lead them forward into the life they want to lead.

If you are interested in using my services, I work out of my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire as well as online. Contact Me and I will be happy to have a chat to answer any questions you might have.

Photo courtesy of Kerry at the Mental Health Foundation

It’s Christmas. You’re with the rest of your wider family. The drinks are flowing – maybe a little too liberally. Do you all get on? Do you always end up arguing? Do you look on embarrassed as some of your family are behaving in a way that you wouldn’t dream of? Is a family Christmas something you look forward to, or do you dread it?

For some Christmas is a happy time, but there are plenty of people who find it a time filled with anxiety – dreading the argument that they know they will have with their cousin, horrified at their sister-in-law’s drinking habits, and just waiting for their auntie to make passive aggressive comments about the present they got.

Why Do We Do This To Ourselves?

It all starts in the primitive part of our brain called the Limbic System. This part of our brain is responsible for our survival. It is not very clever, it just finds a pattern of behaviour that seems to work and repeats it.

Think of a squirrel – it is looking through the leaf litter on the forest floor for something to eat when you come wandering along the path. The squirrel does not stop to think how dangerous you might be, it just does what it always does – it runs to the nearest tree and climbs, staying on the opposite side of the trunk to you. It’s life is ruled by its limbic system and so it always does the same thing – the thing that it believes is going to keep it alive.

Our own limbic system (which gets more in control after a few drinks) is on high alert at the Christmas party. The party is not part of its routine, so it is on high alert for potential survival threats.

When your cousin wanders over to say hello, the limbic system goes on even higher alert, remembering the argument you had last year. It also knows that whatever you did last year seemed to work – you survived – and that’s all it cares about. It does not care how you feel about things or whether you are having a good time. Its only job is to make sure you survive. So it encourages you to repeat the argument you had last year

And so your limbic system raises your anxiety, and creates anger, just like it did last year and the year before that. Before you know it, you are in a full blown argument following exactly the same pattern as you always do. You go away from the party angry, with anxiety levels really stirred up, vowing never to talk to your cousin again.

… And your limbic system has won.

What Can We Do Instead?

You have a clever brain. You know that the Christmas family party is not life-threatening – even though your limbic system does not. You need to keep that intelligent part of your brain in charge.

So remember: There are things you can control and things you cannot control. Do the best with the things you can control, and accept that things are going to happen that you cannot control.

• You cannot control your sister-in-law’s drinking habits as she pours the drink down her throat straight from the bottle, but you can control whether or not it upsets you.
• You cannot control your cousin when they say something controversial just to get you riled up, but you can control whether or not you choose to respond.
• You cannot control your auntie’s passive aggressive comments about the present you got her, but you can chose whether to feel bad about it, or just laugh it off.

You see you cannot change other people’s behaviour, what they say, their beliefs, or what they think of you – but you can change your own reaction to these things. Your goal is to end the party without adding to your stress and anxiety. And if you can, enjoy the your time together too.

And Finally …

After the Christmas break, if you find your anxiety levels are a bit out of control, if you want to get back in control of your emotions, if you find you cannot manage this on your own, then you might want to consider hypnotherapy. I would be happy to have a chat if you want to Contact Me. I work out of my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire as well as working online.

Photo by Maurício Mascaro on Pexels