The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety

Do you feel trapped in the vicious cycle of anxiety?

We all experience unhelpful, worrying and anxious thoughts and feelings from time to time. They may pass through your mind very quickly and be soon forgotten. Or perhaps they linger for a short while but then time passes, or the thing you were anxious about gets sorted, and everything returns to normal. You move on and get back on with your normal routines, activities and thoughts.

However, if you struggle with problematic anxiety then you can get caught in the ever suffocating vicious cycle of anxiety. Your mind races with anxiety provoking potential catastrophes and worst case scenarios. You feel anxious, tense, restless and on edge. You struggle to concentrate and feel negative and low. You start avoiding things because you just don’t feel you’ll be able to cope or you excessively worry about others noticing your anxiety.

With anxiety, your negative thoughts can feel so prevalent, strong and dominant that you struggle to focus and take control over your thinking. You can’t focus as your mind races through all the negative possibilities. Even as you try to grasp what is going on inside your head, the anxiety moves on to something else. It can feel like you are fearfully chasing after your own mind and never catching up with your thinking. Even if you are able to interrupt, block or rationalise one of the worst case scenarios in your head, your anxiety changes direction and flows like a river onto some other perceived threat and awful catastrophe. It’s exhausting.

One thought just flows into another, and because those thoughts are so distressing and overwhelming, you also experience all the physical symptoms of anxiety. Your breathing increases, your heart races, you feel hot, you feel nauseous and you struggle to function. How you feel influences where your thinking goes. Because you feel so anxious, those anxious feelings drive your imagination into more and more negative and anxious thinking. This then keeps you feeling anxious, that then drives anxious thinking and which then adds to your uncomfortable feelings. You get caught in the vicious cycle of anxiety. Your anxious thoughts and feelings feed into each other. You feel worse and worse and your anxiety feels stronger and stronger.

You then start to dread things. What if those imagined worst case scenarios actually happen? What if you go out and feel anxious in front of others? You feel terrible, you are filled with anxiety and so you start to avoid things. This can bring some short term relief. However, that vicious cycle of anxiety gets strengthened by avoidance and the cycle just continues to repeat. You feel anxious even when you are not around the people, places, situations and circumstances you have been dreading. You start to anticipate feeling anxious and you expect it to happen. And then of course, you experience anxiety and this confirms your belief that you can’t handle, deal and cope with things.

The vicious cycle of anxiety snares you in a self re-enforcing pattern of anxious thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

 

Breaking The Cycle

No matter how bad you feel right now, it is very possible to break that ongoing cycle of anxiety. You can take back control over your thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions so that you feel more calm, confident and in control. As you re-engage with things, calm your feelings and direct what gets time and space in your head, you start to feel better. This then becomes a positive, habitual cycle of feeling better and better in yourself.

To feel better requires an approach that covers the three main, interlinked, strands of anxiety. You need to be able to interrupt, direct, challenge and change your own thoughts. You want to be able to calm your feelings so that they don;t escalate to the point of intense distress (where you struggle to think clearly). Changing these things requires taking action and you can then start taking small, progressive, positive steps that create a sense of relentless forward momentum.

In essence, this is what hypnotherapy helps you to do, to take control over your own thoughts, feelings and behaviours. And there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of hypnotherapy as a treatment for anxiety (as well as the many, many positive reviews that you can read on this website).

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Using specific, strategies and techniques, you can learn how to break the cycle of anxiety and to direct your own thoughts and feelings.

Anxiety hypnotherapy can help you to calm anxious feelings when they arise and to reduce how often the anxiety occurs. You can also learn to recognise, change and redirect your unhelpful thoughts. With new positive thoughts and more rational, balanced thinking, you can take more and more control over what gets time, space and focus in your mind. Rather than being stuck in the vicious cycle of anxiety and feeling fearful, worried and tense, you can move your thoughts in a positive, progressive way.

The more you take control over your thoughts, the more you will feel calm, confident and in control. The more calm, confident and in control you feel, the calmer and clearer your thinking becomes. It becomes a positive, habitual cycle. You will feel happier and better and feel equipped to handle whatever may come your way.

To your health and happiness, 

Dan Regan

Anxiety Hypnotherapist in Ely & Newmarket

 

Need help to break the vicious cycle of anxiety? 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