Anxiety is Something We Do, Not Something We Are.
What is Anxiety
Anxiety is an emotional response to something perceived as fearful, a thought that something bad is going to happen and we won’t be able to cope.
Symptoms of anxiety may involve a racing heartbeat, sweating, rapid breathing, and blushing - typical of the 'fight or flight' response, our brain's way of helping us deal with sudden and unexpected dangers.
The fight or flight response evolved millions of years ago when early humans were often faced with life-threatening situations. When suddenly faced with a saber-toothed tiger, we needed to react quickly by either running away or fighting.
Today, however, our reasons for feeling anxious are not usually life-threatening. They often revolve around change, conflict at home, performance at school, to worries about friendships or social situations. These everyday experiences can trigger the same automatic response, and we react and feel like we’re in real physical danger.
When Anxiety Becomes a Problem
It’s natural to feel a little anxious from time to time, and these feelings usually pass when the situation is over, but anxiety can become a problem, when
you feel anxious too often or for too long
it affects your day-to-day life
you avoid doing things you want to do
find it difficult to concentrate on anything other than the perceived threat
are constantly scanning for possible signs of potential threat
have difficulty relaxing and sleeping
use alcohol or other substances to try to relax
The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety
At the heart of anxiety is the fear about some potential threat, trying to cope with a future event that you believe will be negative.
Because the symptoms of anxiety can be very unpleasant and frightening, it’s possible to believe that something terrible is actually going to happen. This can have a significant impact on how you behave and go about your daily life.
You may do this by scanning for possible signs of potential threat and checking in with yourself to see whether you will be able to cope with that threat.
When you notice your anxious symptoms, you think that you can’t cope with the situation, and become more anxious.
You might try to reduce the anxiety by engaging in safety behaviours such as sitting near an exit so you can escape from a social situation or avoiding such situations altogether.
Avoidance behaviours like these might make you feel less anxious in the short term but the next time you have to deal with the situation, you’re less confident that you can cope with it, and you have deprived yourself of the opportunity to test out your fears and your ability to cope.
The vicious cycle of anxiety diagram shows how your thoughts, feelings, and the way you behave (safety behaviours and avoidance) can all be connected and how you can mistake the symptoms of anxiety as evidence that you really are in danger.
Reversing the Vicious Cycle of Anxiety
The good news is that you can find a way to harness all these connections to your advantage because the fact that everything's connected means that if you can start to make a change in one area, you will get knock-on effects to these other areas as well.
The first important step in reversing the anxiety cycle is gradually confronting feared situations.
Doing this, it will lead to an improved sense of confidence and a more realistic appraisal of the threat and your ability to cope.
Some people might encourage you to tackle your biggest fear first – to ‘jump in the deep end’; and get it over and done with. I prefer to encourage people to take it step-by-step through a process of graded exposure.
Of course, the joy of combining Hypnotherapy with this Cognitive Behavioural approach is that you get to work on building yourself-confidence and facing your fears in the comfort and safety of the session with the support and guidance of the therapist before trying it out in the real world. You then start with situations that are easier for you to handle and work your way up to more challenging tasks.
This allows you to build your confidence slowly, to use other skills you have learned, to get used to the situations, and to challenge your fears about each situational exposure exercise.
By doing this in a structured and repeated way, you have a much better chance of reducing your anxiety about those situations.