Break Down Anxiety and Worry – Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket
Anxiety and worry are unpleasant and uncomfortable and can become all-consuming and debilitating.
You may struggle with all of the anxious thoughts that race through your mind. You find yourself imagining all sorts of worst case scenarios and catastrophes that could occur and that would be disastrous for you in some way. One worrying thought can just spiral into another and another, taking up all of your brain space and focus and wearing you out. And you may have found that the more you imagine these anxiety provoking thoughts, the more and more you think them. It can get harder to stem the tide of anxious thoughts and if you think them enough, after a while it starts to seem habitual and automatic. Your mind is filled with the anticipation and expectation of disaster, failure, distress and suffering.
And those anxious thoughts lead to the uncomfortable physical feelings and sensations that you struggle with. And because you feel anxious, you find even more thoughts race through your mind and fixate your thinking. And the feelings just linger and persist. It can easily become and exhausting and unpleasant internal roller coaster where you may feel your are thrown from negative thought to negative thought and from anxious feeling to anxious feeling.
In amongst all of those anxious feelings will be a mix of heart racing, tension, restlessness, rapid breathing, sweating, shaking and an inability to focus and concentrate. Your anxious thoughts lead to your body doing what it’s meant to do when faced with a threat (albeit here it is a perceived threat in your own thinking). Those uncomfortable feelings then add to a sense of dread, disaster and doom and your mind starts to seek out the source of the threat leading to even more unwanted thoughts. In this way, the anxious cycle can keep itself running and running and the whole while you feel more tired, frustrated, despairing and out of control.
Talking about things like ‘anxiety’ and ‘worry’ and using those words/terms to describe things can also come with its own difficulties. These are general labels that allow convenience when describing what you are experiencing. Yet your anxiety and the things you notice may differ from someone else’s experience. And trying to tackle something called anxiety directly is tricky because it encompasses so many components and you you can find yourself trying to grasp at one element, only to find another component becomes more prominent. Anxiety seems to have a lot of substance until you try to tackle it and your thoughts and feelings can then seem much more elusive, slippery and harder to take hold of.
In order to overcome it, we need to break down worry and anxiety so that we can tell which elements to focus on to make positive and substantial change.
Hypnotherapy For Anxiety
The research and evidence has demonstrated the effectiveness of hypnotherapy for anxiety.
There are dozens and dozens of individual reviews on my website that support this and we also have the scientific evidence that supports the benefits of hypnotherapy for anxiety.
Valentine, Milling, Clark, and Moriarty (2019), brought together the results of all controlled studies of hypnosis for anxiety to quantify the effectiveness of hypnosis in treating anxiety. They found that hypnosis is a highly effective intervention for anxiety, and concluded from the evidence that:
“The findings of this meta-analysis show that hypnosis is a highly effective intervention for anxiety. Our results indicate the average participant treated with hypnosis achieved more anxiety reduction than about 79% of control participants at the end of active treatment and about 84% of controls at the longest follow-up“.
This is hugely impressive evidence and really demonstrates the beneficial impact of hypnotherapy for anxiety. There’s a bit more on that research in this previous article of mine: The Effectiveness of Hypnotherapy as a Treatment For Anxiety
And I’ve covered many strategies and concepts around how you can challenge anxious thoughts in these previous articles:
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
And if you are struggling right now with anxiety and all the wanted thoughts and feelings it brings, then there are many hypnosis downloads that can help you with getting back to being more calm, confident and in control: Anxiety Help Hypnosis Downloads. And if you want to develop your ability to turn negative thoughts into more positive ones then this hypnosis download is for you: Positive Mindset Hypnosis Download
Breaking Down Anxiety and Worry
Anxious thoughts and feelings can shift and flow. You try to grasp at them only to find they’ve shifted and morphed into something else. Using words like ‘anxiety’ and ‘worry’ to describe things makes it a challenge to tackle and change. It has substance but when you do things to try and feel better your thoughts and feelings seem to elude capture.
Sometimes then, rather than trying to tackle ‘anxiety’ as a whole in order to feel better, you need to break it down into what is actually going on.
You have your anxious thoughts where you imagine future worst case scenarios by either running pictures and movies in your head or describing things in your self talk. You also have the physical sensations that you experience in your body and that can be described more specifically. And these things lead to anxious behaviours such as avoidance. In essence then, anxiety is made up of your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviours.
Recently I was talking about this to a client after he told me he had been trying not to worry or feel anxious. Firstly, the word try implies failure. You either do something or you don’t. If you want to test this close your eyes and clap your hands, then keeping your eyes closed don’t clap your hands, and then try to clap your hands (if you then clapped then you didn’t try, you just did it). Ditch the word try from your thinking as it implies a lot of effort to achieve nothing. If you want to add another level onto this then close your eyes and imagine clapping your hands to recognise the difference between something that is real and accurate (an actual clap) with something made up inside your head (rather similar to anxious patterns of thinking about what might happen in the future).
That covers the trying aspect of making changes. And then we are left with words like worry and anxiety. Useful as a short way to communicate how you feel, less helpful when you want to tackle what is actually going on and to interrupt how it keeps itself going.
What we refer to as worry or anxiety involves imagining things that could happen in the future. These things are negative, distressing, embarrassing, filled with failure and loaded with things going wrong. Imagining is a form of thinking and so, therefore, you are imagining, predicting and making up things using thoughts. You may have a lot of these thoughts and you may have been thinking them for a long time. But your anxiety and worry here are just thoughts.
Can you learn to be in control of what you think? Yes, of course you can. Can you begin to think of a different thought that is less problematic? Absolutely you can. Anxiety is a collection of thoughts and ways of thinking and so the solution becomes to find ways to think differently about a situation or to be able to think about something altogether different.
The same applies when we look at the feeling component of anxiety. It’s a series of physical sensations and reactions that go on inside your body. Once again, ask yourself whether you can change a feeling or physical sensation and you will have to acknowledge that you can. As with thoughts, you may need some help and guidance to learn the most helpful ways to change things to help you feel better yet you absolutely can change a thought or change a feeling and do something different and less problematic.
And so whilst talking about your worry and anxiety can be useful to explain what you are experiencing and to communicate things, if you want to overcome anxiety and worry then break things down into their component parts to identify what you actually doing and what you then need to actually tackle and change
And as you break down your worry and anxiety, you’ll find it a whole lot easier to start to interrupt. dispute, challenge and change your own thoughts and feelings in ways that can soon help you to feel more calm, confident and in control.
To your health and happiness,
Dan Regan
Break Down Anxiety and Worry
Award Winning 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 dozens of other people have said after their hypnotherapy sessions with Dan: Hypnotherapy Testimonials
And check out these powerful hypnosis downloads that can start helping you right away with anxiety, confidence and more: Hypnosis Downloads
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