Dan’s Blog

How To Stop Anxious Thoughts

by Dan Regan | Jun 3, 2014 | Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks

If you struggle with anxiety then you will be very aware of the two main symptoms that come with anxiety – those anxious feelings that you notice in your body, and the anxious thoughts that race through your mind.

Everyone is very different in how and when they experience their own anxiety – for some the feelings and thoughts are a constant burden through every moment of the day whilst for others they may come and go or be more acute in specific situations.

So when someone with anxiety comes to see me they are desperately seeking relief from the physical feelings and the worrying thoughts.

Your Stressed Brain

The simplest way to explain anxiety is the state in which your mind is on high alert looking out for any sign of danger so it can take action to keep you safe and protected. Of course you probably aren’t in any actual, real danger but your mind can’t tell the difference between worrying about a hungry wolf coming towards you and all the worry and stress that you are experiencing from work, family and all the other areas of your life.

Your mind registers all that stress, worry and anxiety and gets ready to take action – and so your body responds by getting you ready to move, and your breathing increases, you get hot and sweaty, the adrenaline pumps around your body. You notice all these things and start to interpret them as anxiety, which causes more worry and stress and leads to more physical symptoms and a cycle develops where the feelings and thoughts feed each other and fuel each other.

Anxious people often talk about thier brains feeling full or lilke cotton wool, how they have trouble concentrating and how tired they feel. It’s like having a stressed out brain working as hard as it can and therefore has no room for anything but anxiety.

Anxiety Buster: Ditch The News

by Dan Regan | Jun 2, 2014 | Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks

How much news do you follow? I’ve worked with people who watch the news over breakfast, read the paper on the way to work, check their news app throughout the day, look at news online at lunchtime then back home for the evening news and the ten o’clock news before bed.

And as much of the news is full of disasters, pain, suffering and sadness, that’s a lot of worry and stress being force fed into your mind.

Limit Your News Intake

Let’s be honest, most news stories don’t change so quickly that you need to check in on them dozens of times a day. What tends to happen is you get the same story wrapped up in several different ways.

And all the pain, suffering and disaster you are absorbing is like waving a red flag in front of an anxious mind and screaming ‘it’s dangerous out there!’ No wonder many people with anxiety would rather stay indoors where it feels safer from all that worrying stuff ‘out there’.

Anxiety Buster: Cut the Caffeine

by Dan Regan | May 22, 2014 | Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks

Could caffeine be contributing to your anxiety and stress levels?

Many of us like a few cups of tea or coffee each day. Or you may prefer energy drinks or other drinks that contain caffeine. You may like the taste, enjoy the ritual of taking a break at the same time or maybe you use them to help you overcome your tiredness and lethargy.

How Caffeine Fuels Anxiety

Caffeine is a stimulant that can help perk us up and keep us going. Yet the effects of too much caffeine can be symptoms such as feeling on edge or jittery, agitation, over-alertness and palpitations. In essence, it produces effects similar to stress on our bodies.

And if you suffer with anxiety, several of these symptoms may seem all too familiar already – such as those shaky, jittery, on edge feelings and those palpitations.

If you are already anxious or stressed then the impact of caffeine can be enough to amplify all those feelings. And the more you feel them, the more you focus on your anxiety, creating a cycle of worry and even more anxiety. It’s like pouring fuel on your anxiety and then trying to cope with the fire you’ve created.

Anxiety Buster: Learn To Relax

by Dan Regan | May 15, 2014 | Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks

If you currently suffer with anxiety then you may constantly feel on edge, tired and tense. Your mind may race through worrying thoughts and those ‘what if’s’ that focus on things going badly in the future.

Often clients tell me their minds feel full or like cotton wool, they can’t grasp onto things going on now and they often struggle to concentrate and focus.

In basic terms, all that worry and anxiety leaves your brain feeling stressed out and your body feeling exhausted.

Learning to relax

So to combat anxiety effectively you need to start learning how to relax, to give your mind a bit of a pause and some peace from all that other stuff whizzing around inside.

Often anxiety cleints tell me they don’t or can’t relax. They have to keep busy to try and distract themselves from their anxiety. Yet as soon as they do stop, like when they try and sleep, all those thoughts and feelings come flooding back.

But just as you learnt to feel anxious, you can start to learn how to relax again.

How Eloise Overcame Her Sleep Anxiety

by Dan Regan | May 15, 2014 | Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks

In this video testimonial, Eloise talks about how she struggled for over two months with anxiety around sleeping.

What started as a couple of nights struggling to get to sleep escalated into a cycle of worrying about going to sleep and then feeling too anxious to actually sleep. And the longer it went on, the more exhausted she felt and the more of a struggle it became to sleep.

Overcoming Anxiety Around Sleeping

Yet very quickly after working with me, she soon found that she could easily relax into a deep sleep and awake feeling refreshed and ready for the day.

As she put it: “I can honestly say that my two sessions with Dan were life-changing. I was becoming very low due to my constant lack of sleep, and it was having a severe knock-on effect on my life, however Dan enabled me to get a grip on the problem and overcome it. I can’t quite put my finger on how he did it, but he did, and for that, I will be forever grateful.”

How Anita Massively Increased Her Confidence

by Dan Regan | Apr 14, 2014 | Confidence and Self Esteem

I love helping people increase their confidence and self esteem.

I’m very lucky to be able to help people move from feeling anxious, worried and hiding in the sidelines. Using the key of confidence hypnotherapy they soon light up, discover their confidence and feel comfortable being themselves. In a very short space of time they quickly start moving forward and doing the things that they want to do, achieving some amazing things along the way.

Hypnotherapy For Confidence

One client who used my confidence hypnotherapy to change her life was Anita and this is what she said after our sessions:

Five ways to increase your stop smoking success

by Dan Regan | Feb 2, 2014 | Quit Smoking Hypnosis

It’s that time of year when many people decide to stop smoking for good – only for their healthy intentions to go up in a puff of smoke a short time later.

Actually stopping smoking is something that most smokers intend to do. Yet it can seem quite daunting to actually stop smoking. After all, you’ve probably tried and failed before and you may be surrounded by others with similar tales of failure and frustration.

If you really want to stop smoking and you want to start feeling healthier, happier and wealthier right now, then here are five things that will help give you that push and increase your chances of success.

Ending Anxiety and Panic Attacks

by Dan Regan | Jan 30, 2014 | Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks

Recently I was working with a client who told me she was suffering with anxiety and panic attacks. Even as she told me she was clearly on edge, anxious, and even a bit desperate to end the cycle of anxiety she now found herself in.

The anxiety had been creeping up for a while and then seemed to explode into all areas of her life. She had been signed off work and she felt many of the symptoms that go with anxiety and panic.

Feeling restless and on edge
A loss of confidence to do things she used to do
Avoiding crowded places and preferring to stay at home
Constant worry and anxious thoughts and feelings
Hot and cold sweats
Sleeping very little or not at all
Worrying if she would ever ‘feel better’
Worrying whether she would have another panic attack

Overcome Your Fear of Spiders

by Dan Regan | Jan 21, 2014 | Phobias and Fears

Do you struggle with a fear of spiders?

Recently I’ve helped a number of people conquer their fear of spiders. One of the first things that nearly all of them told me was that they knew it was irrational – but they still couldn’t stop their fear and panic around spiders.

One of my clients would visibly physically flinch at just the thought of a spider. She told me she couldn’t even look at a picture of one without getting that panicky feeling, and she had countless examples of times she had needed to call for help to get a spider out of the room. She even had times she dreamt about them and woke in a panic

Other clients check places in their houses where they had seen them before, and the sight of a spider on TV, especially a moving one, can start that feeling of fear.

Coping With Grief

by Dan Regan | Jan 21, 2014 | Hypnotherapy Hypnosis and NLP

As many of you will know, I lost my dad to cancer last November. It’s naturally led me to think about grief and the impact of losing someone close to you. I’ve probably written elements of this article in my head dozens of times over the past months.

And because it is probably the most personal article I’ve written, I’ve hesitated to actually publish it until now. I’ve only put this here now because losing a loved one is something we all have to face at some point in our lives and I hope that these words may be of help to others.

The stages of grief

It’s often said that there are different stages of grief, from numbness, denial and isolation, through pain, anger, sadness and acceptance. I’m sure I experienced most of these at different times in a varying order and to different degrees.

Of course there is no requirement to experience all of these elements of grief. Indeed, I remember working with one lady who had lost her partner and was

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