Anxiety Hypnotherapy: Your Path to Inner Peace and Empowerment

Discover How Hypnotherapy Can Transform Your Relationship with Anxiety and Stress

What is Anxiety?

Well, there are different ways of looking at that:

Certainly, for people who experience it chronically it can feel overwhelming, like they’re broken. Struggling to sleep, or even think straight at times.

For me, when I was going through social anxiety I would second guess myself constantly and isolate, because it felt so much safer.

I believed other people were better than me, knew more than me, that my opinion was less valid. Even though logically I knew that wasn’t always true, I still thought it was, and ruminated on it.

Terrified to make a mistake, or be criticised.

And that’s the thing, when we go through anxiety what we’re really experiencing is FEAR. 

That intense sense that we’re in danger, under threat somehow. Even when there’s nothing in our immediate environment to tell us that we are.

I know we’re all different. Which is one of the beautiful things about life.

And I also know that for some people their experience of anxiety can feel so intense that they appear stuck in a loop, like extreme OCD, or panic, often feeling unable to leave the house.

But at the heart of anxiety, the structure is the same.

Fear, driven by our focus on what might happen or what has happened. Not necessarily on what is happening.

But Why?

Well, let’s start at the beginning:

We’re born into a world of uncertainty.

Each of us arriving on the day that we did, knowing nothing about who we are, what we are, or where we are.

I, for instance, popped into this world about a year after my brother died. He was a baby when he passed. A cot death. One of those horribly inexplicable things that no one wants to face.

So, when I appeared my family was grieving – but I didn’t know.

My siblings were 3 and 8 at the time, so were hardly in a position to process what had happened, or what they were feeling.

And my parents, well they were still grieving, and my mum in particular had suffered a great deal in her life, and struggled to trust.

So, life in our house was filled with people struggling to manage how they felt. My dad’s alcohol use and my mum’s anxiety, and us kids caught in the middle, trying to compensate as best we could.

Now this isn’t about me, it’s about anxiety and how hypnotherapy can help. I’m just using me as a handy example to illustrate a point.

Because, when a baby’s born they’ve got an awful lot to learn about themselves and the world around them. How to eat, walk, talk, and identify things, including themselves. Because it takes several years for a baby to be able to look in a mirror and say that’s me.

They don’t even realise their hand is theirs until they bite into it.

So, where do we get the information we need?

Well there are only three options available to us as kids, the two cultures we’re born into and the experiences we have.

Our home cultures: the environments we grew up in, our parents, caregivers, siblings, friends and extended family. And the rules and ideas they had about life.

Our societal cultures: The country we grew up in, the rules of that society, schools, religions, laws, TV, music, movies, books, magazines, and whatever else we were exposed to.

And the experiences we had, both good and bad.

All of that teaching us about ourselves and the world?

It’s the foundation for our values. The things we think are important:

• How we should act,
• What’s right,
• What’s wrong.
• And more importantly, what’s normal.

Who we should be.

We then store that info in little filing cabinets in our minds, that psychology calls schemas. Or blueprints for how to act and respond to the situations we meet. Including how we see ourselves.

All of it becoming unconscious and automated so we don’t have to think about it and can respond really quickly.

Which is useful for driving, walking, speaking and eating, but not for managing our emotional life.

Because If the information we had growing up wasn’t that accurate in relation to our own worth as an individual, or what’s safe and not safe, then our responses may not be that accurate either.

As Wittgenstein once said:

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”

― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

So how can hypnotherapy help?

Well, what we know about anxiety is that it’s a response to fear.

And when we’re frightened our body, quite naturally, goes into a stress response: Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn, so that we can survive.

Because that’s the name of the game.

Our body and identity want to survive at all costs and so they have ways of telling us, when something threatens our survival. Really clever ways, that we label as stress and Anxiety.

The issue is we usually don’t have enough information available to make a realistic decision about the things we’re facing, and our brains don’t like gaps.

So, they fill in the gaps using imagination.

Ever watched a TV show where an episode ended on a cliff hanger and then you spent the next week imagining what might have happened.

Getting yourself worked up about what you THINK has happened, and where you THINK the story will go, only to be surprised when the next episode finally airs.

That’s what happens to us in day to day life to.

We see something,
hear about something,
anticipate something,

And our brains try to fill in the gaps so that we can be prepared, so that we can survive.

And if it’s a scary thing then we enter a stress response.

Because we need to be aware there’s a problem, and then we need energy to run and fight.

So, our body sets off the anxiety alarm, and then redistributes the energy it needs from the three main users of energy in our body:

• Our brains (Frontal Lobe in particular)
• Our Digestion
• And our Immune system

And sends that to our muscles etc.

Which is why, when we are chronically stressed or anxious, we find ourselves struggling to solve problems or think straight, getting ill frequently and suffering tummy problems.

So, with Hypnotherapy I can help you learn how to recognise and calm those responses, using breathing and vagal stimulation techniques.

From there the energy starts to return to the parts that need it, and your body starts to return to a state of equilibrium.

Then we can explore those beliefs in more depth. Because as I’ve said, the beliefs and rules we’ve set up to navigate this world are mostly unconscious, and based on a child’s perspective.

Now traditional therapy, only works with the conscious mind not really acknowledging the unconscious programming that’s driving the bus.

Which reminds me of a description I once heard, of our conscious minds being like an ant, with a clear goal. I want to head that way, and so it sets off.

The problem is, our ants don’t realise that they are riding on the back of an elephant (the unconscious mind) and that the elephant is heading in the other direction desperate to keep us safe, and we don’t know it’s happening.

So, with hypnotherapy I can help you reach a place that allows you to communicate with that unconscious part.

To see what your elephant’s trying to protect you from

And open avenues of communication, that allow your unconscious to learn new things and respond differently.

When I learned this, it changed my life.

I’m not saying it’s going to happen overnight, because nothing of any worth ever does.

But when I learned how the mind really works and how our beliefs are formed, I started to shift my relationship with the experiences I was having.

Then, when I learned to soothe my nervous system, I re-enforced those changes even more.

Then when I got to really communicate with the parts of me that were making decisions, I got to change my relationship with those parts too.

That’s how we make lasting change, and I want to help you do the same thing.

This New Year, I’m offering you the chance to have an initial session with me at a huge discount. You’ll get to spend two hours with me for less that the price of one. Where we get to dive deeply into what’s happening for you, and start you on your journey to making the changes you want to make. Check out the link here for more details about my Stress and Anxiety Deep Dive sale.