We will all experience stress and anxiety on numerous different occasions throughout our lives from childhood through to adulthood. Anxiety is a mental health condition that is thought to affect as many as 8 million people in the UK. By reading this article I hope that you gain a more in depth understanding about anxiety and the common myths surrounding it.
Myth 1 – I’ll always be anxious
It’s certainly not the case that you need to suffer from anxiety, but you will always have the ability to generate anxiety. Anxiety is our unconscious response to a stressful situation. It is one of the reasons why we have survived as a species and why you are alive today to read this article.
In our modern lives it is very seldom that our lives our under threat, but this wasn’t the case for our early ancestors. In order to survive they needed to be able to respond instantly to life threatening situations by creating anxiety.
When their brain registered a threat they would instantly produce stress hormones. These elevated their breathing and heart rate and blood flow was directed away from less vital parts of the body to their arms and legs. This increased their ability to either fight or flea from the threat. So as you can see anxiety was a really important way of bettering their survival chances.
As we don’t encounter the same life threatening situations as our ancestors anymore, we seldom need to create anxiety. Unfortunately, the part of our brain that is responsible for creating anxiety hasn’t evolved to align with our modern way of life. As a result, it will mistakenly register seemingly innocent situations to be life threatening and therefore create the same response.
If you have anxiety you will spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking from the primitive, emotional part of your brain. This means that you will spend much of your time dwelling of past events or catastrophising about the future.
Solution focused hypnotherapy will enable you spend more time thinking from the intelligent, rational and positive part of your brain where there is no anxiety.
Whilst you will still have the ability to create anxiety if needed, you won’t suffer daily from the damaging negative effects of it.
Myth 2 – Anxiety is all the same
Anxiety will have both a mental and physical response on the body. If you suffer from anxiety, then you will be familiar with your mind and bodies response to it.
Anxiety means that we tend to either think negatively about the past or the future. These negative thoughts will alter the chemical balance in your body.
You may often feel jittery and on edge due to the production of stress hormones. These stress hormones will also cause a rise in body temperature, heart rate and breathing rate. You may feel like you have knots in your stomach as a result of blood flow leaving it to go to other parts of your body. Your body is primed ready to fight or flight.
The reason for your anxiety, the symptoms that you feel and the severity of them will be individual to you.
The cause of anxiety can also vary differently between individuals. I have helped many people to overcome a variety of different anxiety related conditions including; social anxiety, general anxiety, fears and phobias and OCD.
Stress and anxiety can also be the major factor in other conditions such as insomnia. Anxious thoughts mean that the sufferer will either have difficulty getting to sleep or staying asleep, or sometimes both.
High levels of stress and anxiety can also make it very difficult to lose weight and is one of the main contributing factor to other conditions such as IBS and disordered eating.
Myth 3 – I’ll just have to live with my phobia
It’s very common for people to think that they have no choice but to live with their phobia. Most people have an amazing ability to cope and as a result most can live with their phobia.
It’s often only when their phobia is starting to control their life and stopping them from living the life they want, that people start to research ways of removing it from their lives.
If you are currently suffering from the debilitating effects of living with a phobia, you can find out more about how hypnotherapy can help using the highlighted link.
Myth 4 – Only adults suffer from anxiety
Unfortunately, this certainly isn’t the case. The Children’s Society estimate that as many as 1 in 6 children suffer from an anxiety related condition. They also estimate that in the last 3 years the likelihood of children suffering from a mental health condition has increased by 50%.
Thankfully solution focused hypnotherapy is an extremely effective way of helping children to gain freedom from their anxiety. As all the talk is not about their problem children tend to get very engaged in their sessions. Children make excellent hypnotherapy clients as they tend to have great imaginations.
You can find out more about solution focused hypnotherapy sessions for children by using the highlighted link.
Myth 5 – Only therapies that focus on the cause of the anxiety work
There are hundreds of different therapies available, many of them seek to help find out what has happened in the past in order to give reason why the client currently feel and act the way they do. For many this can be very powerful but for others this can be like opening raw wounds and can actually make their condition worse.
Solution focused hypnotherapy is the exact opposite of these types of therapies. Rather than analysing the problem we focus our attention on the outcome you want to achieve. As a result, all of the talk is problem free so people are able to move forwards with their life without the need to analyse the past.
Perhaps you might be interested in reading some of my other articles;
Common myths about hypnotherapy
A users guide to solution focused hypnotherapy
Is solution focused hypnotherapy right for me?