Hypnotherapy for Stress, Anxiety and Overwhelm
“74% of UK adults have felt so stressed at some point over the last year they felt overwhelmed or unable to cope”
Statistic from The Mental Health Foundation, 14 May 2018. By YouGov in the largest known study of stress levels in the UK
Are you ready to feel differently?
When you are calm, you work from the human, modern part of your brain. This allows you to think clearly, feel hopeful, focused, lighter, to make decisions - and stick to them! In turn, this can let you have more joy and meaning in your life. To be the best version of yourself.
Maybe you want better relationships with no drama? Sit down at dinner with your family and enjoy it? Or do you want to focus better on your career? It could be that you want space to figure out what gives you meaning and joy? Feel like you’re taking care of yourself, feeling healthier, that you can breathe freely.
It doesn’t matter what it is you want, Solution Focused Hypnotherapy helps you be in the driver’s seat of your brain, so you can work towards it.
How to manage anxiety
The good news is that we can all learn how to relieve stress and anxiety so we feel more in control of ourselves. That inner control is crucial to feeling how we want, whether that is calm, confident, hopeful, optimistic, focused, or something else.
Working with me using Solution Focused Hypnotherapy will help you understand your mind and how to use it so it is helpful for you. This gives you a sort of manual on how to use your amazing capabilities. It also reduces anxiety levels so you can be in the part of the brain that is constructive, positive and creative.
The Solution Focused (SF) Therapy part helps you figure out how you would like to be. We would work together so you know what that future looks and feels like in your everyday life so it’s not an abstract dream.
The Hypnotherapy part helps the new patterns and thoughts you defined with SF to become strong and part of your new identity.
“When therapy shifts from being a “less of” approach to a “more of” approach... building on what’s working... everything changes. ”
Why do we feel Stress and Anxiety?
Stress
Stress is external (to us) pressure. We often have many competing demands on us. The right amount of pressure can make us more focused and help us get things done. Unfortunately, stress is often more long term.
It can come from too much to do so you become overwhelmed; not knowing how to handle a situation; not achieving what you want or expect. Long-term or excessive stress creates problems for us both emotionally and physically unless we learn how to deal with this effectively.
Stress is often dealt with using a range of strategies for increasing resilience, prioritising and organising your tasks, and creating effective habits.
Anxiety
Anxiety is internal pressure coming from how we think about situations. Stress can make us anxious when we feel overwhelmed by it.
Anxiety comes from an old, primitive part of the brain that had survival value to us as stone-age people. And even earlier. That old part though was developed for dealing with polar bears and rival tribes attacking, not the worries we have now.
This part of your brain is there to help you survive, so it mobilises your body’s fight, flight, freeze system when it thinks you’re in danger and need help. Thankfully fighting or running away from a predator is rarely necessary for us nowadays, but the system is there and we need to learn how to manage this primitive part of the brain otherwise it can take over our thinking and functioning.
Symptoms of anxiety
Because the fight/flight/freeze response is there for emergencies, it activates the whole body and mind for survival. That’s why the symptoms of anxiety are also felt everywhere.
Physical symptoms of anxiety
When anxiety causes the fight/flight/freeze response, e.g. your blood flow, heart rate, tummy, change so your body is ready for a dangerous situation. This can feel like being short of breath, racing heart, dizziness, tummy problems. In the long run, you can get tension headaches, insomnia, lowered immune system and much more.
Emotional / cognitive symptoms of anxiety
If you are in an emergency situation, you are more likely to survive if you do something immediately. Thinking could slow you down and mean injury or death therefore the primitive part of the brain can completely shut down the thinking part.
Anxiety can feel like being under constant pressure; being excessively worried; being irritable; feeling scared of what’s happening in the world; struggling to concentrate and focus; avoiding situations; feeling undervalued or without enough meaning in our life; too high or low expectations of yourself or from others and many more.
