Anxiety is a feeling of worry, feeling tense and fearful of potential events in our lives that may or may not happen. When we are feeling anxious we might start to become obsessional in our thinking where we cant get certain thoughts out of our mind.

This can lead to a state of heightened awareness and vigilance where we are anticipating negative outcomes and finding it harder to see the positives in any given situation leading us to get into a constant cycle of negative thoughts and behaviors.

If we are feeling anxious, we might experience problems in our sleeping, digestive problems, headaches and can also experience panic attacks. Feeling anxious may stop us from going out to places and avoiding situations where we might start to feel anxious.

Anxiety is caused by negative thinking, it is not necessarily the events in our lives that cause anxiety it is our thought patterns surrounding these events and how we choose to respond that cause the level of anxiety experienced.

​

The primitive emotional brain area that regulates our stress response cannot tell the difference between imagination and reality if we overload our mind with negative thoughts our mind perceives that we are in imminent danger and our stress response is triggered from the primitive emotional area of our brain. This stress response is often referred to as our “Fight, Flight or Freeze” response.

​

As humans, we have evolved our fight flight or freeze response to protect ourselves from danger. When we feel under threat, our bodies release stress hormones throughout our body such as adrenaline and cortisol.

​

Such hormones are great for helping us think fast and escape quickly from our perceived danger such as oncoming car or indeed a wild animal in primitive times. However, this response is only meant to be triggered for a short period of time, when we are out of real danger we come out of our “fight, flight or freeze” mode into a “rest and digest” mode that replenishes our body as a whole.

​

However, if we are caught up in a constant cycle of worry and negative thinking our minds perceive we are still in danger and the stress response is prolonged which leads to chronic stress and anxiety – a feeling of “surviving” rather than “thriving”

​

Modern negative thought patterns such as “Am I good enough?” “Am I parenting right?” “Ill never have a baby” “Ill never afford that” “Why am I still single?” “Do people like me?” “Am I doing enough at work?” Will be perceived as real danger in the same arena as being chased by a tiger or getting in the way of a fast moving oncoming vehicle.

This means we remain stuck in a chronic stress response which results in us being in a heightened vigilant, panicked obsessive state for long period of time. In addition to this as we are not getting the opportunity to return to our “rest and digest” mode this anxiety and stress starts to impact upon us physically too which is why we can experience sleep problems, digestive problems, headaches, panic attacks and changes in appetite

We can begin to reduce our anxiety levels by firstly starting to improve upon our sleep patterns. Prioritising our sleep will allow our mind to being to process our emotional thoughts and feelings and help us feel more calm and focused.

We also have the inherit ability to control our stress response and indicates to our mind that we are not in danger and allow our mind to revert to our “rest and digest” mode.

When we are in this mode our bodies release hormones such as serotonin to enable us to feel motivated, cope better with our day to day lives, feel calmer and happy – a return to our true authentic self where we are thriving and no longer just surviving.

​

To begin to control our stress response we need to return to our primal instincts of positive behavior by using the 3P’s

Positive Thoughts (limiting our internal negative chatter and being kinder to ourselves)

Positive Actions (Doing more of what we love)

Positive Interactions (Spending time with family and friends, being kind to others, volunteering our services).

All of these areas lead to an increased flow of serotonin in our bodies that enables us to enhance both our physical and mental well-being.

As I Hypnotherapist, I will work with you to improve your sleep patterns and begin to find solutions to ways that you can increase your activity in these three very important areas. In addition to this, I also have the tremendous advantage of using trance within my sessions.

Trance is a focused state of mind and is a very natural state. Trance is where our conscious and unconscious mind come together to focus on the same thing (e.g. resolving the issue that is troubling you). This helps the process of breaking free of negative patterns and reducing our anxiety and stress enormously.