Anxiety

Anxiety is very common - a poll of 6,000 UK adults in 2023 found that 73% had felt anxious in the previous two weeks, with 20% feeling anxious most or all of the time. These figures don't surprise me, as anxiety is the most common issue I have helped people with over the years.

Anxiety vs fear.

We have all experienced the emotion of fear at some point and this is normal. Fear is an immediate response to an external, identifiable threat, typically short-lived and subsides when the threat is removed. Anxiety is a state, rather than temporary emotion and is often related to potential or perceived threats. It can often be about future events or uncertainties, e.g., worrying about the presentation you have to do next month.

I have experienced my own battles with anxiety in the past and so understand how uncomforable it can feel and how it can affect every area of life. Anxiety can however be overcome -it does not need to prevent us from living the life we choose. Whether you've been battling it for years or months, there is a way to break free from paralyzing anxiety and start to live again

When I work with people to help treat anxiety I like to start with education. Many of us feel ashamed of anxiety and others have been misinformed, seeing anxiety as dangerous and to be avoided at all costs, but this only hightens our anxiety.

Anxiety is triggered by neural pathways, but what has been learned can be unlearned as our brains are continually learning. I have a variety of evidence based and effective tools that treat anxiety, including hypnotherapy. visualisation, breathwork, CBT, EFT/energy work and somatics. These tools help to rewire the neural pathways in the brain to stop triggering anxiety.

I help clients to become adept at regulating their nervous systems to stay in a calm state more of the time. All clients also have access to my "client resources" area on my website, which includes access to free Hypnotherapy downloads.

Why not take a look at my blog post on anxiety here, then contact me to see how I can help further.

Anxiety vs alarm

It is crucial to separate out anxiety from alarm:

Anxiety is the anxious thoughts we have.
Alarm is the sensations in our body.

Once we separate the two out, we can then learn to understand what is going on and interupt the cycle to create change.

I find this distinction crucial, as we can learn to stop getting pulled into the images and thoughts that revolve in our brains and by turning towards the alarm sensations in our body with our total focus, we keep out of our thoughts which escalate our bodily sensations if we get sucked in. By putting our focus on our sensation, we can learn to 'surf the waves' of our sensations and if we can fully allow the sensations to be there, we can fully process the sensation/emotion and it will dissappear and in doing so, it loses the control over us. If we allow it and stop putting our energy into fighting it, we learn that we are stronger than the sensation and it can actually dissappear in just a few minutes if we fully embrace it.