Hypnotherapy for Anxiety
Occasionally, everyone experiences anxiety. In fact, it would be unnatural not to. When you’re feeling anxious, you might experience a racing pulse, dry mouth, sweatiness, and shallow breathing. This might happen before a big speech or an exam. And it’s absolutely normal. It provides motivation. Yet, excessive anxiety causes problems.
What is Excessive Anxiety?
Excessive anxiety frequently develops gradually. For instance, it might start with you feeling lonely after the loss of a loved one, after experiencing unwelcome life changes due to a chronic illness or pain, or after moving somewhere new. It may also arise after you feel weighed down with too much responsibility. In all these situations, it’s a case of unmet emotional needs. In other words, you may worry excessively due to a lack of safety, connection, or status.
Yet, other people may develop anxiety suddenly. You might feel overly anxious after a tragic disaster, such as a fire or a crash. You might even become consumed by fear, which indicates post-traumatic stress. Anxiety may further take on the form of obsessions, compulsions, phobias or a nagging feeling of foreboding – all of which are attempts to ward off a sense of threat.
But how do we explain why some people face similar circumstances without becoming overly anxious?
Negative Thinking Patterns and How They Impact Your Anxiety Levels
Interestingly, the way you explain the negative events that have happened to you have a significant impact on whether or not you’ll experience excessive anxiety.
When it comes to anxiety, three types of thinking are tightly associated with its development and its close partner, depression. These three thinking patterns include:
1. How Personally You Perceive and Take Events - You may believe it’s your fault. You think you didn’t get a particular job because you weren’t good enough, as opposed to thinking that the competition was tough.
2. How Pervasive You Think The Effects Will Be - One thing goes wrong, such as losing your job, and you think everything in your world is going wrong. You may believe this to be true even if your relationship is strong, you have good health, you are surrounded by good friends, and more.
3. How Permanent You Believe The Effects Will Be - You think that you’ll never get another job again or a new partner. Or you believe that you will never find a dream house like the one you missed out on.
If you suffer from bad anxiety, you may also tend toward negative thinking patterns. You may not even notice you’re doing it. For example, you might think, “I’ll never cope,” or “It’s going to be awful,” or “No one even likes me.” You may even catastrophise events, such as thinking that you’ll get fired for being late one time. By changing your negative self-talk and challenging your catastrophic thinking patterns, you can lower your stress levels and ultimately, lower your anxiety.
You may also have an overly negative imagination leading to excessive anxiety. You may often worry about ‘what if?’ As a result, you come up with a wide variety of dreadful outcomes for yourself or your loved ones. This further keeps you in a state of high emotional arousal, which may take on extreme forms including phobias or obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Hypnotherapy Treatment for Anxiety
Hypnotherapy can help you overcome anxiety in several ways. Firstly we can identify what emotional needs are not being met in your life so you can find healthy ways to meet those needs. Secondly, we can use hypnotherapy for anxiety to help you relax very deeply by using your imagination in a positive way, as well as help you discover calming and relaxing techniques to deal with fearful or worrisome thoughts. This lowers your heightened emotional arousal, which deters the situation from becoming worse.
In a session of hypnotherapy for anxiety, you may be required to rehearse successful outcomes instead of bad ones. This helps you overcome phobias, panic attacks, and traumatic memories quickly and painlessly. It also helps you practice for future and potential anxiety-ridden events. Ultimately, you are encouraged to find ways to reduce your stress and focus outward on fulfilling activities. In turn, this will meet your own emotional needs and help you move past anxiety once and for all.