What is anxiety?

First of all, let’s talk about what anxiety really is and why we think and feel all sorts of uncomfortable stuff when we’re anxious…

Anxiety is an emotional response to a future anticipated event. For example, a presentation you have to give at work next month or a hospital appointment for a new lump or bump you’ve found. Although it is similar, anxiety is different from fear. Fear is an emotional response to an immediate threat, like being chased by an angry dog. Anxiety sounds like that voice in your head that says to you, “Oh, but what if…?”

Before I go any further, there is something I want you to know. Despite what your anxiety might be telling you like you’re out of control, you’re losing your mind, there must be something seriously wrong with you or “WHAT IF IT NEVER GOES AWAY?”, anxiety is not dangerous. Yes, the symptoms can be bloody awful, but it cannot harm you.

As I said, the symptoms of anxiety can be grim. So much so that it’s hard to believe that they are not severe physical or psychological problems. Here is a list of some of the symptoms you might have experienced now or in the past:

Physical symptoms of anxiety

· Racing heart /palpitations

· Headaches (constant or reoccurring)

· Aches/pain across the front of the brow

· Lightheadedness

· Eye floaters

· Ace behind the eyes

· Dizziness

· Constantly feeling lethargic

· Physical exhaustion

· Stomach grumbling

· Irregular bowel movements (urgency to go to the toilet more often than usual)

· Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

· Aching/pressure in chest/feeling winded

· Tickling/fluttering sensation in the stomach/chest/throat

· Nausea

· The need to continually move around/pace around

· Sweating

· Ringing in the ears

· Neck ache

· Jaw ache and tenderness

· Dry mouth

Psychological symptoms of Anxiety

· Excessive worry

· Panic attacks

· Derealisation (feeling lucid or detached from surroundings)

· Depersonalisation (feeling detached from persona/personality)

· Feeling apprehensive

· Hypochondria (the fear that you are seriously ill)

· Worrying about having panic attacks

· Body checking (looking for signs of illness/something wrong)

· Repetitive and looping thoughts

· Inability to relax or switch off

· Difficulty concentrating and/or difficulty completing tasks

· Feeling hopeless and depressed

· Overactive imagination

· Agoraphobia (fear of going outside/being away from your safe place)

· Fear of what people will think of you

· Concern that you’re developing a psychological illness

· Doubt that you’ll never be you again

· Self-analysing

· Negative thoughts of being alone/isolated

· Deep level of focus on personality/identity

· Loss of interest in doing things that you enjoy

· Dwelling on thoughts for long periods

· Always trying to figure out / think your way back to being ‘normal’ again

· Difficulty falling asleep or experiencing disturbed sleep

What causes anxiety?

At a physical level, anxiety is caused by the fight or flight response. Hands up if you’ve heard of fight or flight, adrenaline and cortisol before? If you’ve experienced anxiety and carried out a bit of your own research into it, chances are you have heard of these things before. Hell knows there are enough blogs out there on this topic!

Both adrenaline and cortisol are chemicals found in your body, along with loads of other beneficial substances that help make up the normal, healthy functioning of your body. One of the many functions that adrenaline and cortisol support is the fight or flight response. Fight or flight has been super helpful at keeping us humans alive over the hundreds of years and keeping us at the top of the food chain.

When your brain detects an immediate threat to your safety, it releases adrenaline and cortisol into your body. Adrenaline causes all these fantastic changes to happen in your body to prepare you to either fight or run for your life. You might notice you get a kind of tunnel vision, that’s because your brain is focusing on the threat in front of you and an exit plan, right then it doesn’t need to see anything else. You might feel your breath getting quicker and your chest muscles getting tighter. That’s because your body is working hard to pump more oxygen into your body so that your muscles are prepared to run fast or fight hard to stay safe. Same as that feeling that you need to pee or poo, like right now! Your body wants to be as light as possible to run, plus you don’t need these muscles to fight, so they relax, and the blood supply is sent to other places in your body that are more helpful. The list is long, but you get where I’m going with this. Adrenaline is part of an incredible system that helps to keep you alive.

Ok, but if I’m not in real immediate danger, why has my fight or flight response been activated? Surely if I can tell my brain that I’m not in danger, then I’ll stop being anxious and going into fight or flight? Well, kind of yeah, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a threat it sees in front of you and an image of a perceived threat that you have created using your powerful imagination. (You can learn more about this in my post How Can Hypnosis Help My Mental Health?) Your fight or flight response can easily be triggered by something that we imagine might happen, as quickly as it can by a snarling dog hurtling towards you.

Ok, so I just need to think positive and stop creating these anxious thoughts and images in my mind, and then I won’t trigger my fight or flight response? Again, this makes perfect sense, and this isn’t an unrealistic solution. However, if it were that simple, I wouldn’t be writing this blog, and you wouldn’t be here looking for ways to help your anxiety. In your quest for a solution, I am sure you have read lots of self-help books and read lots of motivational ‘inspo’ quotes on Instagram and Facebook. I know I did in the past. So, I am not going to bullsh*t you by telling you your anxiety will just disappear with two sessions of magical hypnosis with me and some deep breathing techniques. Sorry, I’m not going to sell you that, it’s just not me or the type of therapy I believe in.

Here’s why it’s not as simple as thinking positive or not creating triggering images or thinking anxious thoughts. We find it much harder to reason with ourselves when we’re in the full throws of fight or flight. This is because your frontal lobes are engaged fully in the fight or flight response. You want your brain to help you gain perspective. However, your mind is on autopilot, desperately searching its vast data system to find a solution to save your life. Your brain can throw out old memories from the past. These memories might contain similar situations you’ve been in before, which can send you spiraling off somewhere else and lead to more unsettling thoughts and feelings. You might try hard to think positive or tell your brain that you’re not actually in danger. That really awful scenario it saw playing out wasn’t real. It was just you, imaging something horrible happening. Surely now your brain knows it’s not in danger it can chill out. It might be a surprise then that the response you hear is: “BUT WHAT IF SOMETHING REALLY AWFUL HAPPENS THIS TIME, I MUST SAVE US!”.

Stuck in the anxiety loop?

You: “Hmmm, I’m feeling quite nervous about that work presentation next week. What if I get found out for not being very good at my job? I can just see it now, people in the room asking questions I don’t know the answer to, and then my boss will wonder why she hired me. She’ll think I’m incompetent and everyone in my team will just look at me like I’m a massive d*ck? What if I lose my job and then I can’t pay my rent, and then I have to go home and live with my parents again. I’ll never find a partner then. Who will want someone in their 30’s with no job, living with their parents?”

Brain: “This does not look good, does it? You’re in danger, I must not let this happen. I’ll get onto this right away, leave it with me.”

Bam, adrenaline and cortisol are dumped into the body. Fight or flight is engaged, and you are now on autopilot. You are hyperaware of everything in your surroundings.

You: “What is that pain in my chest? Sh*t, I’m having a heart attack, oh my god. There must be something wrong with me, this is horrendous. I think I’m dying.”

Brain: “Oh my god, we’re having a heart attack. I need to do something and fast.”

Bam, more adrenaline and cortisol are pumped into the body. You are now stuck in the fight or flight loop.

Sound familiar? Over time this constant flow of adrenaline and cortisol can make you hypersensitive to anxiety. Put simply, the more you practise being anxious, the better you become at it. That super helpful life-saving friend will be waiting there, poised and ready to go the next time you create an anxious image in your mind or an anxious thought pops in.

Eventually, the nervous system becomes exhausted, leading to feelings of low mood and sadness. Thoughts like what if I never feel ok again? Or what’s the point of being here if I’m always feeling like this? Might start to creep in. Then you will probably begin to feel anxious about those uncomfortable thoughts. So you end up stuck back in a loop of anxiety again.

Before I go on to talk about how hypnotherapy can help with anxiety (which it absolutely can do), I want you to know this. You can feel better. It is possible to get out of that loop. Anxiety cannot harm you, even though it feels grim. I have done it, and I have seen and helped many others do it too. You are not alone, and you will be ok. Now read that again until you start to believe it and then reread it until you actually do believe it.

So, how does hypnotherapy help with anxiety issues?

Even though anxiety feels like it just pops up out of nowhere, it doesn’t happen overnight. Anxiety is the result of many experiences, as well as unhelpful thoughts and beliefs from our past. When we don’t deal with these experiences, thoughts and beliefs, they build up. You likely started by worrying about something that seemed small or easy to put out of your mind quickly, or it could have been triggered by a significant life event. Whatever it was, these things accumulate over time, often evolving into new worries and keeping you locked in that loop of anxiety.

Hypnotherapy is a helpful way of figuring this stuff out. First of all, it’s essential to explore how your anxiety manifests itself. Anxiety can present itself differently for each of us. It is vital to work out what keeps causing you discomfort and how it’s having a direct effect on your life right now.

Hypnosis can help you identify and connect with where your worries come from so you can understand how they inform your anxiety. Everyone’s concerns will be different depending on our earlier life experiences. Our unconscious mind is like a vast database full of our life experiences, including thoughts, feelings, beliefs and behaviours. In that database, there might be beliefs that we formed, decisions that we made and behaviour we engaged in which at the time made sense. However, in the present, they are unhelpful and cause us to feel anxious and stressed out.

Once you have a better understanding of where these worries come from and how your anxiety is being informed, you can relate to them more compassionately. This knowledge also enables us to make powerful and lasting to change to our lives. Using hypnosis, you can work towards developing more helpful beliefs, thoughts and behaviours, and put them into action. A Hypnotherapist will support you using a range of different tools and techniques to help you achieve your goals.

A Hypnotherapist can also teach you ways to turn down the fight or flight response; through self-hypnosis, relaxation and self-soothing techniques. Equipping you with coping strategies to use outside of hypnotherapy sessions. Once you become more confident at turning off the fight or flight system, you will be able to do it more efficiently. When you can switch off fight or flight, you have a better chance at accessing the rational part of your brain. Then you can choose how you would like to respond to your anxious thoughts and feelings. Rather than going onto autopilot and feeling like you’ve been hijacked. As I said, you can practise anxiety and get good at it. Which means you can also practice switching off the fight or flight response. You can then allow yourself to work through your worries from a calm and rational point of view. The more you practice, the better you will become. Eventually, you will know that whatever anxiety throws at you, you can cope and you have got this.

Are you ready to book a Hypnotherapy session?

If you think hypnotherapy might be for you, or if you’re still undecided and would some more details before you book a free hypnotherapy consultation, give me a shout. I’d be delighted to book you in for a consultation at my office in Manchester City Centre or answer any other questions you might have. Get in touch here.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————I am a Hypnotherapist working to help people understand their mental health better. I offer private Hypnotherapy in-person sessions in Manchester City Centre and also online. I also offer free advice on my blog and on Instagram. Please share this blog post if you found it helpful or know someone who might benefit from it.

Disclaimer: Please note, the information in this blog post is not intended to be therapy and does not constitute a client-therapist relationship.

Does hypnotherapy help with anxiety?