It’s fair to say that some degree of anxiety, on occasion, is perfectly normal. There is, let’s face it, a lot to be anxious about at the moment, both in the wider world and closer to home – but why do some people suffer more anxiety than others? And can hypnotherapy treat anxiety?
Firstly, let’s dispel the myth that some people don’t get anxiety. Everybody worries. Everybody has something in their life that concerns them, that causes worry or stress. A certain degree of worry or concern is absolutely normal – it’s a rare man or woman who sails through life with never a care. While we may be very aware of what we are feeling and worrying about, we cannot really know what everybody else is feeling. Some people just don’t talk about it. Which is, as we are all coming to understand, not a healthy way of living.
It is, however, true that some people are more prone to intense worrying – are more emotionally sensitive and tend to react more strongly to events, real or imagined, distant or close to home – than others. This can often be traced back to some for of trauma in earlier life – perhaps as a child something happened that has resulted in heightened senstivity and a tendency to assume things will definitely go wrong. This happens because our brain chemistry can actually change after a traumatic experience, leaving us wired to avoid any similar situations at all costs – our inherent fight or flight response, which exists to alert us to real dangers, is enhanced to the point where it’s not actually helpful at all, sending danger signals when there is no real danger at all.
Even if you have not experienced any form of trauma in your past, some psychologists believe that there are those of us who are born predisposed to worry more than others. Studies that have tracked children from birth right through to adulthood have seemed to show that babies who have strong reactions to new situations tend to grow up to be more anxious as adults. Fascinatingly, although the babies being followed had different upbringings and different challenges in life, the study showed that those who were most reactive as babies had a higher propensity to worry more as adults than the less reactive babies. Unless your parents have really excellent memories, and watched your reactions and compared them to the reactions of other babies to the same stimuli, this one will be hard to prove for any individual, of course.
For others, increased levels of anxiety can be the result of a prolonged period of stress – this might be fears over work challenges, such as redundancy, a new and challenging manager or beingoverloaded with tasks, or long-term ill health, your own or a close family member, or even something as apparently every day as selling your home and moving house. Whatever is triggering that stress, our bodies respond in the same way, releasing a hormone called cortisol.
The release of cortisol triggered by a single stressful event can actually be helpful, as it provides a boost of energy and focus. However, a long period of stress with the associated ongoing production of cortisol can be very unhelpful, as it can lead to a poorly regulated stress response that can result in the onset of ongoing general anxiety.
Perhaps you have spent the last few months worrying about your workload, and if you can cope. If it were a single project demand, with a fairly immediate deadline, you would most likely have a burst of stress, work out a solution and move on. Months of stress and uncertainty about whether you can cope, and worries about everything going wrong, and the associated overload of cortisol can result in a stress response to every single, even very little, worry that raises its head. Suddenly you’re dealing with general anxiety about absolutely everything, and no idea how to address it.
In short, yes. Hypnotherapy can successfully treat general anxiety.
How? Well, just as every individual is different, as such every treatment solution is different. At the heart of it all, however, sits support in helping you take control of negative thoughts, helping you stop yourself from catastrophising and living with the constant need to plan for ‘WHEN something goes wrong’ to moving to a more relaxing approach of ‘crossing that bridge IF something goes wrong.’
As a qualified hypnotherapist, with years of success treating people with anxiety and stress, I will help you learn how to calm yourself when you start to feel overwhelmed, to find perspective and power and self-belief.
I use a mix of treatments, including BrainWorking Recursive Therapy, NLP and Tapping to give you control over your anxiety, whatever has triggered it.
If you want to learn a little more, I offer a free 20 minute consultation where I can learn about you and what you’re living with, and let you know how I can help.
Call me on 0161 374 0227 or, if you prefer, email me at sally@mindsolutions.co.uk
Does your fear of flying affect your holiday plans? Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool to…
