Anxiety and Certainty – Hypnotherapy Ely and Newmarket
If you struggle with anxiety then you already know how you can quickly and easily get caught up in the whirlwind of anxious thoughts and feelings. Your head fills with all the possible worst case scenarios about what is going to happen in some future time, situation, circumstance or event. You catastrophise, dwell and overthink all the possible bad stuff that could be coming your way.
As if that constant stream of negative thinking wasn’t enough, you also struggle with the unpleasant and uncomfortable anxious feelings and sensations that take over how you feel. You feel agitated, restless and tense. Your heart may race and you can have trouble switching off. You may struggle to rest, eat, sleep and even function.
Whether your mind fixes on one worst case thing that could happen or your thinking jumps, races and cycles from one thing to the next faster than you can grasp it, the end result is that you feel anxious, worried and down.
Anxiety thrives on uncertainty and the unknown. You have no way of knowing how things will pan out and so your anxious imagination and focus can run wild with possibilities. Whether you picture scenarios in your mind or have a running conversation with yourself, there is dread, worry and a sense of impending doom. Of course, because your anxiety is about some future thing, it is impossible to get total certainty over what might happen and you just can’t be completely sure that everything will be ok.
Because you can’t know what will happen, your anxious thoughts and feelings flow into that space of uncertainty. You feel anxious and that drives your imagination to find a focus for your fear. You imagine the worst and that ramps up your anxious feelings. The worse you feel, the more you can find to worry about and dread. You may even find yourself going beyond that initial catastrophe and focusing upon all the ongoing future waves and ripples of disaster that you worry will follow on from it.
So how can you take back control over your anxious thoughts and feelings even in the face of that lack of certainty?