reducing anxiety and panic attacks
Struggling with Anxiety? You Are Not Alone
Some 38% of adults were experiencing high levels of anxiety, according to an Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey between December 15 and 19 2021. This is huge! We are definitely going in the wrong direction as a country in terms of anxiety.
Anxiety can be characterised as a fear that is in the future. It can feel more like a worry or simply unease. There is no life without anxiety but when this anxiety begins to impact the quality of your life or disrupt your day to day activities then you may have come to a point that getting a little assistance is going to be really helpful.
Experiencing this level of anxiety is surprisingly common and around 25% of the population will have what could be termed as ‘an anxiety disorder’ at some point of their lives. Despite it being really common, our human reaction to anxiety or panic attacks is often more than lacking - with most people hearing ‘Just pull yourself together’ and ‘stop worrying’, which studies have shown to simply result in people feeling more isolated, on top of their concerns.
We mostly believe that thinking our way out of anxiety or panic attacks is an option - certainly trying to relax the body and incorporate things that make us feel better is going to be part of the way forwards, but ‘trying to not worry’ is often counterproductive (try not thinking of a blue tree) and we can inadvertently begin to isolate ourselves from the important things in our lives, which further builds uncertainty. BUT this sort of situation is highly treatable and responds extremely well to the right therapy. There is no reason to suffer for a moment longer than necessary.
There are many manifestations of anxiety and here are some of the broader categories:
Generalised Anxiety Disorder - feeling anxious about a wide range of issues or possible situations rather than concentrating on one particular event or you feel overwhelming anxiety for seemingly no reason
Social Anxiety Disorder - manifesting as a general persistent and overwhelming fear of some (or all) social situations
Panic Disorders - regular or recurring moments of panic - sometimes for no particular reason but that can get worse over time and begin to feed into other areas of life.
Agoraphobia - You have an intense fear of being in a place where it seems hard to escape or get help if an emergency occurs. For example, you may panic or feel anxious when on an airplane, public transportation, or standing in line with a crowd.
Separation anxiety - Anyone can experience separation anxiety disorder. If you do, you’ll feel very anxious or fearful when a person you’re close with leaves your sight. You’ll always worry that something bad may happen to your loved one. This can also happen at the end of a relationship or when a relationships is breaking down
Anxiety can often result in insomnia, withdrawal, anger and irritability and avoidance behaviour. Rumination is common (playing out worries over and over in your mind) and can show up in a lack of motivation, concentration and a feeling of dread.
The physical symptoms of anxiety can be quite profound and range from dizziness, palpitations, trembling hands and legs, sweating, shallow breathing and chest discomfort. It can manifest as stomach ache and even as diarrhoea. There can be a low level sensation present all of the time or it can come an go in a moment. You may genuinely feel like you are anxious all of the time as it seems that our reality is warped into believing this when you might even be able to remember several moments in your day that you can’t recall feeling anxious.
Intentional Freedom and Reducing Your Anxiety
Once a client described to me how she felt that somehow her internal wiring had gone wrong and that she was running on some sort of overdrive. She described how she was worrying about how much she was worrying and that was making things even worse. She was wondering if her life was always going to be like this. The whole experience was making a feedback loop of worrying and anxious sensation - each feeling and thought fuelling the fire. She was literally exhausted at the same time.
Certainly one of the ways that hypnosis can be really effective is convincing the unconscious that the threat that it perceives can be set aside, or does not need quite so much attention paying to it. Results will almost always be felt immediately and then we work together to see how to manage emotions into the future.
And beyond bringing your hyperaroused system to a more comfortable level, so that you can begin to experience life ‘as it should be’, this is where my work is entirely bespoke. For some people, they wish to be able to really understand how they got to where they did, for others they now want to know what is possible in their lives with all of this new-found time and energy. For others will, they wish to explore other parts of their lives to bring about change in other areas of their lives. This is not a one size fits all approach by any means. But it is a given that it will impact your anxiety.
We use techniques and protocols to re-examine moments in life that may have made a difference in the trajectory of our emotions. We learn how the unconscious does a superb job at trying to keep us safe even if that means a completely counter-productive result in our lives.
How Long Will It Take?
In therapy we never like to talk about ‘How many sessions will it take’ because there has been plenty of evidence that if you are told 5 sessions, then all of your best results will happen in your last session. But equally, this holds true if we were to say 7, or 10 sessions. (Lets’ bear in mind that regular counselling/psychotherapy is looking at a year of work to begin with) So we hesitate from recommending a one size fits all approach.
I would recommend committing to 2 sessions to begin with and all I can say is that over 50% of clients seem to make enough progress within 2 sessions that we don’t feel it necessary to schedule another.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, then lets schedule a call - You literally have everything to lose and everything to gain.
