STRESS MANAGEMENT
Stress is a big deal. Stress at work means that a quarter of Brits have taken time off as a result – each person with stress, depression or anxiety will lose an average of around 23 days work per year. When you are experiencing stress, your body is releasing hormones such as cortisol which can have detrimental effects on your health over time. As a result physical health declines, as well as mental health.
Sometimes the big issues start small. A stressful situation escalates. It might be children panicking on sport’s day about wanting to achieve. It might be a worker unable to deal with the pressure of the day to day. Parents may be struggling to balance their work and life commitments. Students are suffering when exams approach.
All those small worries and stresses that we ignore. Not all of them lead to severe mental ill health, of course. But they can all impact our lives in bigger ways than we want. We ignore them, we convince ourselves that it’s not important, we don’t want to be a burden, we think it is just a phase and it will calm down, maybe after a holiday we will feel better…and we do, for a few days. Then we go back to the same place.
Then, one day, suddenly, something happens. It builds up and up until we tip over. We don’t feel like leaving home in the morning, or our sleep goes, or we feel constantly threatened and like everything is a risk to us. Our overall enjoyment of life is threatened. We are moody or tearful or arguments become frequent.
At this time it is key to take a step back and look at how we deal with stress. It’s often the case that we can’t remove the triggers of stress, but we can alter how we deal with it.
HYPNOSIS AND STRESS
When in hypnosis we are not stressed. Our body is calm. During this deep relaxation, when your mind is quiet, your mind is more open to change. In hypnosis, we work to change your emotional responses and encourage your mind and body to face potential stresses in a more balanced way. Hypnosis and a relaxed state can help reduce this release, resulting in a positive impact on thoughts, health and actions.
ANXIETY
As with most behaviours, anxiety is linked to a toxic and limiting belief about ourselves. Nobody was born with anxiety. We were born normal and happy children. Events took place, we took different routes and we experienced different things. Our brain had to react to them. Some of those things could have been dangerous. Anxiety, like every emotion we feel, has a positive intention: to keep us safe, to help us or to make us aware of something.
Its roots are in the primitive brain. We evolved to stay alive and stay safe. However, sometimes we don’t need those safety mechanisms. When we’re not fleeing a tiger that is about to eat us, or a critical comment won’t mean that we are punished – then the positive aspect is gone and only the worry remains. Anxiety has taken over.
At this point, we don’t control our life. A client put it like this: ‘My anxieties control my life. I am ok, but then it surfaces and my life is gone and the fear is in me.’
HYPNOSIS FOR ANXIETY
While in hypnosis we will work on identifying those beliefs that created the anxiety, and when they were created. What happened for our brain to decide that it needed to create anxiety to keep us safe? Events and memories don’t hurt us anymore. It’s the meaning we give to those events. And this is the beauty. We can change that meaning, for good.