Mindfulness For Anxiety and Depression – Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket
Anxiety and depression are two of the main things that people come to see me for help with. All of those unhelpful thoughts and feelings can feel overwhelming, impact upon all areas of your life and leave you feeling stuck, low and full of distress.
In conjunction with other coping mechanisms and strategies, hypnotherapy has an excellent track record and body of evidence to support it’s effectiveness for helping you with anxiety and depression. By learning how to take control over your own thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions, you can start to alleviate your symptoms and feel more comfortable inside of your own mind.
Alongside hypnotherapy, mindfulness can also be very effective for anxiety and depression. Something that certainly exacerbates how bad you feel are all the negative and worrying thoughts that seem to dominate your mind. It’s like your brain always finds something to feel anxious, low or fearful about. And all of the ceaseless negative thinking can feel more and more draining and exhausting for you, leading you to withdraw from the things you might usually do and enjoy. In some cases, you might even start to fear the thoughts that go through your own mind and wonder if you will ever be able to feel better.
Yet, by developing your skills, through hypnotherapy and mindfulness, you can start to feel more calm and comfortable in yourself. You can learn how to feel more at peace inside of your own mind and how to notice your thoughts without engaging with them or responding negatively to them. By doing so, not only will you start to reduce the volume of problematic thoughts you experience, you will also be more and more able to let thoughts come and go and manage what goes on side of your own mind.
Stress and Anxiety Mindfulness
As I incorporate elements of mindfulness in my hypnosis work with clients and in some of my hypnosis downloads, it’s only natural that I should have written before about how mindfulness can help with anxiety and stress, along with some of the evidence to support it’s application for mental health issues (links to those articles below).
Galante et al (2021), carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis looking at the evidence around mindfulness based programmes and whether they helped with mental health issues, such as anxiety and stress. they found that, compared with taking no action, mindfulness based programmes could help you with anxiety, depression, distress and well-being issues.
A review of research (Maddock and Blair, 2021) also suggested that mindfulness can help with anxiety and depression. The development of mindfulness skills can help lead to an increased awareness of, and insight into unhelpful negative thinking. By developing mindfulness skills you can learn how to let these negative thoughts, which contribute to and maintain anxiety and depression, pass without engaging with them or exacerbating their impact. It may also be that by learning to increase your own sense of self-compassion, as well as how to lessen your worry, you can alleviate some of the symptoms of your anxiety and depression.
And in another study, the effectiveness of a mindfulness based stress reduction programme was compared with a common antidepressant medication. The study (Hoge et al, 2022), carried out a randomised clinical trial and found that an eight week mindfulness stress reduction programme was just as effective for reducing anxiety as the antidepressant it was compared against.
And so, the growing body of research suggests that, for many people, drawing upon and learning elements of mindfulness could help you with your anxiety and depression symptoms. In particular, it seems likely that be learning how to feel more comfortable with your thoughts, and so being able to reduce worry and distress from the things you think, you can start to feel better and make positive improvements in how you feel and in how you cope with things.
Mindfulness and Hypnotherapy
Mindfulness can help you with common mental health issues, such as anxiety and stress. Of course, other therapeutic approaches, such as hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (both of which I also incorporate in how I help clients) can also be effective for issues such as anxiety and depression.
We know that hypnosis also has a strong scientific evidence basis to support its effectiveness with issues such as anxiety, stress and depression. And we also have the evidence that shows that combining mindfulness and hypnosis, as I often do with in my own work, can help you with anxiety and stress issues.
Olendzki et al (2020) investigated the feasibility of mindful hypnotherapy for stress reduction in a randomized trial and found that mindful hypnotherapy participants recorded large, statistically reliable, and clinically significant improvements in perceived stress, and reductions in psychological distress such as depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and anger.
“In conclusion, mindful hypnotherapy shows promise for being an effective intervention for decreasing stress. Given that the results for mindfulness and psychological flexibility were comparable or superior to mindfulness interventions delivered in a nonhypnotic context, this novel intervention shows potential for being a unique and a valuable contribution to stress reduction interventions” (Olendzki, 2020).
And it isn’t just adding hypnosis and mindfulness that can help you with anxiety and stress. The evidence and research also shows that adding hypnosis to cognitive behavioural therapy tends to enhance the positive outcomes you are likely to achieve. The evidence suggests that if you are looking to reduce your anxiety and stress, it makes sense to combine mindfulness with hypnotherapy to increase the likelihood that you will enjoy more positive results.
I’ve discussed more about mindfulness and hypnosis, and the research, in these related articles:
Mindful Hypnotherapy to Reduce Stress and Increase Mindfulness
Mindfulness For Anxiety, Stress and Promoting Mental Health
And if you want to learn more about how adding hypnosis to cognitive behavioural therapy to enhance results then there is more on that research here: Hypnosis Enhances Results Of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Updated Science and Evidence. And you can read about the research supporting the effectiveness of hypnosis as a treatment for anxiety here: The Effectiveness of Hypnotherapy as a Treatment For Anxiety (and a scroll through my blog articles will reward you with many, many more articles about anxiety and anxiety treatment too).
To your health and happiness,
Dan Regan
Anxiety Help 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
References:
Galante, J., Friedrich, C., Dawson, A.F., Modrego-Alarcón, M., Gebbing, P., Delgado-Suárez, I., Gupta, R., Dean, L., Dalgleish, T., White, I.R. and Jones, P.B., 2021. Mindfulness-based programmes for mental health promotion in adults in nonclinical settings: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. PLoS medicine, 18(1), p.e1003481
Hoge, E.A., Bui, E., Mete, M., Dutton, M.A., Baker, A.W. and Simon, N.M., 2022. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction vs Escitalopram for the Treatment of Adults With Anxiety Disorders: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA psychiatry.
Maddock, A. and Blair, C., 2021. How do mindfulness-based programmes improve anxiety, depression and psychological distress? A systematic review. Current Psychology, pp.1-23.
Olendzki, N., Elkins, G.R., Slonena, E., Hung, J. and Rhodes, J.R., 2020. Mindful hypnotherapy to reduce stress and increase mindfulness: A randomized controlled pilot study. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 68(2), pp.151-166.
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