Anxiety - Past Concerns Making Themselves Known


Your heart beats alarmingly quickly. You become aware that you are breathing more rapidly. It’s like you are struggling for air. You can feel a tightness in the chest with hot or cold flushes; feeling rooted to the spot. 

Sound familiar? These symptoms are what we commonly call an anxiety attack.

I would estimate that at least 80% of the people I see have experienced some or all of these feelings at some time; often without realising that they were having an anxiety attack.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing for the sufferer is their inability to control the anxiety once it has taken hold. They realise the anxiety doesn’t make sense but they continue to feel a rising fear within themselves.

To the observer, it can seem quite dramatic, but many sufferers have developed an ability to conceal how they are feeling; they suffer in silence.

Something inside yourself but outside your own control.

The person feels anxious but doesn’t know where it is coming from so their mind associates the anxiety with situations in their lives, which helps them make sense of the feelings.

The panic is coming from inside them and is out of their control, and so needs to be explained. From then on every time the person is in the same or similar situation they feel the panic again.

It can be useful to think of anxiety as inner stress and because it is coming from inside their mind and this means they find it difficult to understand why they feel the way they do or how to overcome it.

The symptoms (phobias, panic attacks, social anxiety, low mood etc) 
are outward expressions of unconscious anxiety. 

The anxiety sufferer knows their behaviour is irrational yet they cannot seem to overcome it.
Knowing the anxiety is irrational does not help.

Anxiety is an obstacle. It prevents us from getting the most out of life. The anxiety sufferer finds they cannot concentrate and have negative thoughts and feelings bubbling away most of the time.

They have no idea how to overcome it, all they can do is try and suppress it until the next time it bubbles to the surface.


What Causes Unconscious Anxiety?

Your Past is Your Present

Most people can acknowledge that there are things from their life which they haven’t really dealt with and may well still be causing them problems. Like a pressure cooker, a person can have a build-up of emotional rubbish which shows itself as anxiety symptoms. The symptoms act as a release valve for the inner pressure.

"Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways."
Sigmund Freud

By removing the emotional causes of problems the pressure is relieved and their anxiety can be resolved. Analytical Hypnotherapy helps a person resolve the build-up of pressures which are leading a person feeling anxious, or having a negative mindset.

Far from managing a problem with suggestion therapy, Analytical Hypnotherapy allows a person to work on ‘wiping the slate clean’ and resolve the issues and removing the anxiety obstacle so they are able to get back the old them and be happier and more contented.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting a Better Nights Sleep - The 3 Week Challenge: Principle One

Image
It all began a month or so before lockdown when I noticed how many sleep aids there were in the chemist.  That same week I had four people contact me for help with sleep problems.  This made me ask myself: “What does psychological research and Hypnotherapy tell us about getting a good nights sleep?” A positive psychological approach focuses on what makes people healthy rather than unhealthy. Instead of looking at the behaviour of someone who is struggling to get a good nights sleep, we should focus on the person who frequently sleeps well. How is the behaviour different? Can we copy it? I began teaching people to use these psychological techniques alongside Hypnosis to nudge their sleep pattern. I was pleased to see the differences that could be made…but more people are needed to really see how effective it could be. Fancy a challenge? You need to apply the principles for the next three weeks and review the changes to your to sleep.  Each principle usually takes on
Read more

Hypnosis Explained

Image
    If you are hoping to read that Hypnosis is a magical, mystical, controlling power that can make people behave in ways they choose not to, then you are certainly going to be disappointed. Any assumption that a person is asleep or unconscious is also not the case.  So have you ever experienced Hypnosis? Think back over the last 24 hours…. When you woke up this morning, do you remember that half-awake half-asleep feeling? On that commute to work, perhaps you drifted into auto-pilot and as you were driving along? Perhaps your mind drifted to the things you had to do.  You could be forgiven for thinking that you were daydreaming. Tonight, just as you drift off to sleep you are very likely to experience that same half-awake half-asleep feeling. Every one of those experiences could be given the name Hypnosis. Hypnosis is a natural state we all experience many times throughout the day. It is as much part of our lives as breathing. The idea of being under the control of another or being un
Read more

Imposter Syndrome: Do you sometimes feeling like a fraud?

Image
  One behaviour people experience from one time or another is being an imposter; the feeling that they might get ‘caught’ out for not being as good at what they do as people assume they are. Imposter syndrome is where an individual doubts their accomplishments and abilities and these are converted into a fear of being exposed as a fraud. Interestingly, this still happens when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.  What do you attribute your successes to? Unjustified feelings of being an imposter are an attribution bias. It is a tendency to attribute successes to luck or poor judgment on the part of others’. In a self-deprecating way, the assumption is that they are ‘just getting by’ and if others saw the real them then they would less than impressed. When we feel this kind of imposter syndrome, we failing to have any internal acknowledgment of our own achievements, something which is characteristic of those suffering from anxiety, and unsurprisingly, low self-esteem. Of c
Read more