About anxiety & anxiety disorders
If you’re not 100% sure that what you’re feeling is anxiety, look at the following list of physical and psychological symptoms:
| Emotional & psychological anxiety symptoms | Physical anxiety symptoms |
|---|---|
| Nervous, jittery & on-edge | Rapid heartbeat |
| Difficulty thinking straight & concentrating | Sweating |
| Feeling worried or threatened | Increased blood pressure |
| Feelings of impending danger or panic | Trembling and similar physical sensations |
| Negative internal self-talk and low self-esteem | Hyperventilating (breathing heavily) |
| Creating horror movies – catastrophising | Headaches, muscle pains and digestive issues |
| Panic attacks | |
| Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) |
Covid has made anxiety even worse, with reports showing that it is now at record levels. If left untreated, it can develop into a severe panic disorder that can seriously affect your life.
The good news is that hypnotherapy for anxiety is a fast, effective treatment. It can help you to feel calmer and more in control.
It works by helping you to stabilise and ‘dial down’ your anxiety – and, as a result, lets you do things that you’ve been avoiding or have been struggling with. I can say this with confidence, because for years I’ve successfully helped people to overcome their anxiety in private, one-to-one sessions every week.
These take place either at my London hypnotherapy practice, in my office in Winchester (Hampshire) or online. The choice is yours, and each method is equally effective.
How can hypnotherapy help you overcome anxiety?
Anxiety is regulated by a part of your brain called the amygdala. It reacts to events that it rightly or wrongly perceives to be threatening. And you can’t simply turn this response off just by thinking about it or applying logic to it – because logic is regulated by a different part of the brain.
When anxiety strikes, a reaction called the amygdala hijack automatically and unconsciously takes over.
As soon as this happens, your ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response is instantly activated. The amygdala uses past memories and associations to determine whether or not you should respond in the most primal way possible – namely to attack, run away, or make yourself as small and invisible as you can.
Unfortunately, this reaction is often completely disproportionate to the ‘threat’ at hand.
Help for your anxiety symptoms
The hypnotherapy techniques that I use target the amygdala directly, which is why they work for anxiety. They can be brilliantly effective methods at changing your unconscious response to things – helping you to remain calm, relaxed and in control.
During clinical hypnosis for anxiety, the events that currently trigger your anxiety are neutralised. They lose their emotional power to impact you.
Because of this, you stop reacting in the way that you once did to the trigger event(s), meaning you feel calmer and more in control.
I will also give you some tools that can help you to dial down how you feel on an ongoing basis. We’ll enable you to change what you’re saying to yourself in your head, too, and also to change how you’re feeling. I’ll give you some really useful relaxation techniques, too.
It all adds up to you feeling calm, reducing the risk of a panic attack and enabling you to be better able to cope if you find your anxiety levels rising in the future.
Hypnotherapy for anxiety can also relieve associated symptoms, such as feelings of losing control in a stressful situation (or even daily life) and fear of specific events, people and locations. You’ll feel better equipped to shake off your fears and enter a more relaxed state whenever you need to.