Hypnosis For Anxiety

 Relieve Anxiety Using Hypnosis

This hypnosis for anxiety article looks at how using hypnotherapy can help you overcome the anxieties you suffer in your everyday life and how you can overcome it through hypnosis.

Anxiety is a normal, if unpleasant, part of life, and it can affect us all in different ways and at different times. Everyone has feelings of anxiety at some point in their life. For example, you may feel worried and anxious about sitting an exam or having a medical test or job interview. During times like these, feeling anxious can be perfectly normal.

However, some people find it hard to control their worries. Their feelings of anxiety are more constant and can often affect their daily life.

Sometimes people find it difficult to differentiate between Stress and Anxiety. Stress will come and go just as the source that is causing it comes and goes, such as  work, relationship or money problems, etc. On the other hand, anxiety is something that can persist whether or not the cause is clear to the sufferer.

People suffering with anxiety often struggle to remember the last time they felt relaxed.  They may well feel anxious most days without knowing why. Anxiety can cause both psychological (mental) and physical symptoms. These vary, but can include feelings of restlessness or worrying and may have trouble concentrating or sleeping.

The exact cause of Anxiety is not fully understood, although it’s likely that a combination of several factors plays a role. Research has suggested some of these possibilities may contribute:

•    overactivity in areas of the brain involved in emotions and behaviour

•    an imbalance in the brain chemicals serotonin and noradrenaline, which are involved in the control and regulation of mood

•    the genes you inherit from your parents – you’re estimated to be five times more likely to suffer from anxiety if you have a close relative who experiences anxiety problems

•    Having experienced domestic violence, child abuse or bullying or having suffered other stressful or traumatic experiences.

•    a history of drug or alcohol misuse

Anxiety can have a significant effect on your daily life, but several different actions or changes in lifestyle that may help ease your symptoms, such as going on a self-help course using hypnosis for anxiety, exercising regularly, cutting down on the amount of alcohol and caffeine you drink may help.

It is important to recognise that anxiety is normal, it’s part of our makeup and is a result of a set pre programmed bodily functions that we have had in us since our cave-man days. You may have heard of  the “fight or flight” response. That feeling of “butterflies in your stomach”. This system was designed to protect us from the dangers surrounding us in the wild. It would giving us a boost of adrenaline that would make us hyper-alert, increase the heart rate and boost the amount of oxygen going to our limbs so we were able to fight or flee from danger. However today when this mechanism kicks in, instead of being used to avoid immediate danger, it is often wrongly and inappropriately activated in a person during normal, everyday situations when stress has built up, leading to anxiety.

I actually read a very good description of how it works, unfortunately, I can’t credit the source as I cannot remember where I read it, so apologies :

Imagine you are a bucket, now imagine that all of those things that cause you stress are water. The water keeps going into the bucket, one cup full for work problems, another for the overdraft, one for the school run, commuting to work, etc. over time, and it may be a long time, the bucket keeps getting fuller and fuller, until one day! Yep, it overflows! Anxiety strikes!

That last little stressor was the one that hit the trigger for it to overflow. If we don’t want it to overflow, we need to put a few holes in the bucket, so it never gets to the point of overflowing. In life, all of these holes could be something you do to manage your anxiety, there are many activities you could do, such as pilates, yoga, sport, other forms of exercise, reading, playing or listening to music or spending time with friends or family.

This is good way of looking at anxiety, it explains why sometimes it can seem to strike, right out of the blue with no significant trigger. How many times have you been in a situation with someone and snapped at them over something trivial? When you think about what you have ended up snapping or arguing over the source is irrelivant and often petty. You are not angry at the little flippant remark or situation that has caused the outburst, rather you have snapped because of all the other little things that have built up over time and you’ve reached the end of your tether, your bucket has overflowed.  This is anxiety in action. Using hypnosis for anxiety can help you recognise the source of your problem and tackle them and hypnotherapy techniques are great at helping to treat the anxieties you have.