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?
Anxiety and Uncertainty
Anxiety is made up of the anxious thoughts that take over your imagination and focus, those uncomfortable anxious feelings that take over your body and then the behaviours you adopt to try and deal with your anxiety or that you do in response to feeling anxious (such as avoidance).
No matter how strong or deep rooted your anxiety seems, it’s always useful to keep in mind that it is still just thoughts, feelings and behaviours that work in a negative, unhelpful and limiting direction. Sometimes your anxiety seems like a whole mass of stuff that takes over so breaking it down a bit and understanding what is happening psychologically and behaviourally can take away some of the fear of the unknown. It also gives you more scope for deciding how to start to overcome your anxiety. There are many ways to interrupt and redirect thoughts, as well as to reduce unwanted feelings.
I’ve covered some of these in these previous articles (there are lots more on this website too, and you may like to take a look at my hypnosis downloads for some help and support too):
Does Hypnotherapy Work For Anxiety?
Two Stage Thinking Process – Anxiety Hypnotherapy in Ely & Newmarket
Break Down Anxiety and Worry – Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket
Suppressing Negative Thoughts To Improve Mental Health
Putting Anxious Thoughts on Trial – Hypnotherapy Ely and Newmarket
Disputing Your Irrational Anxious Thoughts
Boost Your Well-being and Reduce Negative Thoughts and Feelings
Developing a Positive Mindset: Turning Negative Thoughts To Positive
Anxious Thoughts – From What-If To If-Then
Anxiety – How To Deal With Anxious Thoughts
Challenging Anxious Thoughts – Anxiety Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket
The Physical Sensations of Stress and Anxiety – Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket
So what else can you do to tackle some of those anxious thoughts and feelings about what may happen?
Firstly, you can bring your focus back to the present moment. Rather than letting your anxious thoughts imagine and create what may happen in the future, you can bring your focus and thinking to where you are and what you are doing right now. Right now, in this present moment, the future is not happening. Rather than the uncertainty and anxiety of imagined worst case scenarios, you can bring your mind back to now where the future is not happening and where you can be certain of what is occurring right now. You aim to be where your feet are. You can describe to yourself what you can see, hear, touch or smell right now. You can describe what you are doing and the actions you are taking. Or simply remind yourself that right now, everything is ok.
You can also seek to calm your anxious feelings. Your anxious feelings drive your fearful imagination so you can take away the emotion that is driving your anxiety. Without the emotions, you just have thoughts and they are much easier to deal with on their own. There are all sorts of ways to reduce your feelings such as exercise, meditation, hypnosis audio and managing your breathing (by the way you can get a free hypnosis download here: Free Relaxation Hypnosis).
When you feel anxious, you find yourself thinking the worst case scenario (or maybe there are several scenarios, yet they are all filled with doom). You think the worst, feel even more anxious, and then think of all the ongoing negative impacts and consequences of that scenario happening. You essentially scare yourself in your own imagination. What often gets lost within your anxiety, is that the worst case scenario is only one possibility of what might happen. We are talking about the future and so many, many, many other possibilities exist about what might happen into the future.
If you only think the worst case your mind will run with it. After all, you have only given it an option of one possible future to focus upon. To counter this, deliberately describe the best case scenario to yourself. Then cover a middle of the road, neither good nor bad type outcome. And then keeping asking yourself what else could happen. You come up with as many future possibilities and variations between the two extremes of worst case and best case as you can. Rather than giving your brain an option of one thing that could happen, you overwhelm your thinking with so many possibilities that you can’t fix on any one in particular. As humans we are rubbish with too many options so you can use this to your advantage. Rather than seeking the certainty that everything will be ok, you use the uncertainty about the future (where none of us really know what is going to happen) to counter your negative thinking.
Linked to this, if you really must think the worst then change the structure of how you think about it. With anxiety you find yourself worrying ‘what if’ this negative thing happens. It’s a very negative and passive way of thinking as if something is going to happen and there is nothing you can do about it at any point except suffer. It’s also very open ended and so your thoughts run and run on and on inside your imagination. So change those thoughts to ‘if-then’ instead. If this negative thing happens (and it is an ‘if’ because it may very well not happen in the way your anxiety is trying to tell you), then you will do things to alleviate, avoid or mitigate it. Add some solutions and actions into your future thinking. This is not only more empowering because there is always something you can do about things (even if that is your own thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions) and it also gives your brain some solutions. This is what your brain is seeking and it closes off the thought instead of it whirring around and around. It doesn’t matter if you will ever need or do those things, you are thinking about the future and that is all made up, created and imagined.
This idea, that our thoughts are made up is also another great strategy to tackle uncertainty. When you imagine those worst case scenarios and future disasters, you are almost treating those thoughts like they are facts. To your imagination it is like they are set in stone and going to happen in the way you are imagining. From experience you’ll know that things don’t always turn out the way you think they will. Our brains and our thinking are often mistaken, especially about what will happen in the future. So remind yourself that your thoughts (and feelings) are not facts. They are not definite, certain and accurate. Our thoughts are just perceptions and habitual thinking patterns and not an accurate account of reality. So call out your anxious imagination for what it is, made up stuff about what might happen in the future.
Alongside all of these things, hypnotherapy has a strong evidence base as a way of supporting you in dealing with your anxiety. You can prime your mind for feeling more calm, confident and in control. As well as overcoming unwanted thoughts and feelings, you can also build your sense of resilience, inner strength and confidence so that whatever comes your way, you know you’ll be able to handle, deal and cope with it successfully.
To your health and happiness,
Dan Regan
Ely Business Person of the Year
Award Winning Anxiety Hypnotherapist in Ely & Newmarket
Struggling with anxiety, stress, worry and fear and need some help? Find out how I can help with a Complimentary Hypnotherapy Strategy Session. Learn more here: Appointments
Find out what hundreds of other people have said after their anxiety hypnotherapy sessions with Dan: Hypnotherapy Testimonials
And check out these popular and powerful hypnosis downloads that can start helping you right away with anxiety, confidence and more: Hypnosis Downloads
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