My Go To Two For My Anxiety and Stress – Hypnotherapy in Ely Vlog
In this video I cover my own go to two techniques for dealing with anxious and stressful thoughts and feelings. These are the two things I always call upon (and teach my clients) because they work so well. Have a watch here:
My Go to Two for Anxiety and Stress
Hello, it’s Dan here today. I hope you’re good. And before I get on to the main topic of today which is my main go to two strategies for dealing with anxiety and stress, the things that I use myself and that work really well. I just wanted to show you my fantastic mug there, have a look at that. A client sent me this, I’m very grateful, I absolutely love it. It might appear backwards, I don’t know, when you look at this but it says Hypno-Dan that side and just proves that not all heroes wear capes. On the other side, No anxiety too big, No problem too small. If you’ve got anxiety I would love to help you to get over that like the person who kindly sent me this mug that I’m going to enjoy drinking my coffee from.
But today I wanted to talk about the two main things that I use personally when faced with worry, anxiety, stress, any unwanted thoughts, any unwanted feelings, that work really, really well and they’re things that I teach all of my clients. Because recently, I’ve had a bit of a challenge going on. Some antisocial behaviour from a fellow tenant, who’s been a right pain in the backside, I’m not going to lie about that, absolutely appalling behaviour that’s left me kind of stuck and it started to play on my mind quite a lot, both when I was here in the office, and outside the office. They creep into your head don’t they those things, they start playing around, all sorts of things go through your mind, made up stuff even, things that might happen, what ifs, worst cases, and you have to work at getting those things back where they need to be.
Sometimes I do, thankfully not very often because I know a lot of this stuff. But sometimes you have to put a bit of effort and time into that and to call upon the right techniques. Incidentally, I’m going to have some absolutely fantastic news about my office very soon for you. I am very excited about it. It’s going to be brilliant, it’s going to be so much better and I think you’re going to love coming to see me there. But that’s for another day.
But today, so what are the main two things I would call upon. Really there are three. The first strategy and this is because I’ve been doing a lot more running recently because of lockdown, and it was my first bootcamp back this morning – I am going to ache tomorrow. But exercise, if you’re not doing exercise to help you stay mentally good, or to deal with any mental health issues that you’ve got going on right now then you’re really missing a trick. All the science, all the evidence says time and time again exercise, being active, whatever form that takes, whether it’s walking, swimming, cycling, running whatever, doing something is a way of combatting things like anxiety and stress, and depression and those kind of things, but also tends to keep you mentally healthy. So it’s a good thing to be doing – if you’re not doing that, start. Please do. It’s so good for your mental health.
But the other two things – the first thing I always call upon is just a breathing technique. You breathe in for a count of seven in your head, out for a count of eleven so the out-breath is longer. When the out-breath is longer it stimulates your relaxation response and everything calms down. Sometimes breathing technique get a bit of a bad rep. but they work – why? because we do it all the time. When you’re anxious, when you’re stressed, you tend to breathe shallower, higher up in your chest. If you hyperventilate you’ll know all about that. But we don’t always get to that point. We want to reverse that and breathe how we breathe normally when you are calmer, which is your out-breath being longer.
The first key with that one is your out-breath needs to be longer, that’s what I said. The second key thing with that is you need to practise it. What most people will do is wait until they’re way up on that scale, stressed up to their eyeballs, totally anxious, and then think about doing something. By then it’s going to take a lot more time and effort even if you remember to do it, so the more you just incorporate it now and again into your daily routine, anytime you’re sitting, when you’re in the car, when you’re not being too active in any way, last thing at night, first thing in the morning. You can’t overdo it but the more you do it the greater the accumulative benefit, the calmer you will feel more at the time and, when you do need it, you’re going to be able to call upon it much sooner to start feeling calmer and feeling better much quicker. So, start doing that, d it proactively, but you can do it reactively as well.
The second one I always call upon, and again my clients will be familiar with this, if you find yourself thinking in an unhelpful way, negative thoughts, anxious thoughts, your mind running away, whizzing away to worst case scenarios, start counting backwards from 300 in threes in your head, so 300, 297, 294 and so on. We’re not aiming to get good at maths here, we’re aiming to get your brain thinking. At one level complete distraction cuts off unwanted thoughts. If you’re busy doing the counting, you cannot be churning that stuff up inside and thinking more and more, and worse and worse, and going down that path where you just feel worse and worse in yourself, and more and more anxious and more and more stressed, which tends to pile in even more unhelpful thinking. And you get caught in that kind of spiral where everything is just going round and round and you can’t get any relief from it. So, on one level we’re just cutting that stuff off as soon as you notice you’re thinking unhelpfully.
The other thing it does though is we’ve got the thinking, logical, rational part of our brain when you find calm, when you feel okay, you can reason things, you can be objective, you can work stuff out. Yet we’ve also got the emotional part of our brain, the more emotion there is, whether that’s stress, anxiety, the more your brain is saying there’s some sort of threat going on here, whether logically it’s a threat or not, your brain is going there is a threat here. So, your heart beats faster, a bit of adrenaline, your breathing speeds up, every part of you is ready for action, to fight or flight, to do something, which is why you’re restless, why you can’t switch off and sleep, why you’re not hungry, why you’re just kind of pacing around, why you’re jittery, all those things because every part of your body is braced for action. When you’re in that state, essentially your clear thinking part of your brain is just shut off. We’re designed as humans not to stop and have a good think when faced with a threat, which means that we want to reverse that and get the thinking part of your brain working harder, essentially telling the emotional part of your brain to stand down, a false alarm, stand down, not needed right now, and to get some more of that clear, logical, rational thinking back in place so that you can evaluate what’s going on, so that you can decide what actions to take, so that you can put things in place, so that you can focus on things which are within your control and let go of the stuff that isn’t.
Which means that when you’re faced with problems, challenges, like antisocial neighbours, you can start to think what am I going to do about this, what actions can I take. I can talk to the landlord, I can talk to the other business owner, in this case, didn’t lead anywhere, but you can take other action, hence my exciting news coming soon. It might be fairly obvious from the fact that I’m talking about offices and talking about a different office. But, you know, I’m excited, so allow me that, allow me to indulge in some excitement after a very challenging period dealing with that antisocial stuff.
So what you want to do then is doing the breathing, doing the counting, taking exercise isn’t necessarily going to fix every mental health issue, but certainly they nudge things in the right direction, they’re very portable, you can breathe, you can count, whether you’re on your own, whether you’re around others, and they start to put you more and more in control of your thoughts and you feelings, which is a good place to be, especially if there’s stuff going on.
If you need more help than that, give me a shout. Let’s talk about that, let’s put some things in place. Many, many things can be done to deal with anxiety and stress that will help you feel better, and help you deal with challenges but certainly incorporating some of that breathing and keeping that counting in mind to interrupt stuff if it does arise, get active, keep focussed, keep doing the good stuff and I will speak to you very, very soon. You take care now.
Dan Regan
21st August 2020
Hypnotherapy in Ely & Newmarket
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