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