Beyond The Swinging Watch - Hypnosis and Psychology in Everyday Life

  In my blogpost Anxiety: The Mind’s Fake News , I explained how anxious and negative thoughts are largely based on false information. The fake mind news is the product of an overestimation of potential threat. We worry and feel stressed as a precaution to the perceived threat in our environment. Our mind tells us one thing and the reality is something different, but we better be on our guard because what if something bad were to happen. It is difficult to grasp sometimes that this thought process is not always at a conscious level. Negative thinking creeps in and we were unaware of why we should feel that way. The fake negative warning signal comes from within our mind with the result being a conscious battle with the reality of the situation. The Burglar Alarm In Our Mind A teenage client of mine once described it as a burglar alarm going off but there was no burglar in the building. You look for evidence of an intruder but there is no-one. You take a moment to reset only for the...

  More and more I am being contacted by worried parents whose teenage son/daughter is struggling with stress and anxiety. Some have become overwhelmed with the school changes due to the pandemic, and other’s have found that their anxiety symptoms have flared up and both parent and teenager don’t know how to cope.  Anxiety is our mind telling us lies. In my blogpost: Anxiety: The Mind’s Fake News , I explain that it is an early warning signal that our mind has used since we were primitive nomads. We are programmed to overestimate the potential threat in a situation because then we are protected from danger even when our estimation was incorrect. One of my teenage clients described it as a faulty alarm ringing in a building but there wasn’t a burglar. Even though everything was safe and calm in the building, the alarm kept sounding. It is very stressful for the building owner to have to manage the faulty alert, particularly when they had no idea why the alarm kept sounding. In o...