What Is Hypnosis for Anxiety and How Does It Work?
There are some important factors to understand when deciding to use hypnosis for anxiety. If you are like most people I see in my practice, you probably have been struggling with anxiety many years before thinking about hypnosis for anxiety.
You probably have your Xanex bottle, or other prescription medication handy, and you may be thinking you are going to have anxiety for the rest of your life. And that is exactly the problem, if you’ll forgive me for saying so: your thinking.
First let me talk a little bit about thinking, then I will get into how hypnosis for anxiety comes in.
Anxiety is frequently caused by our childhood or past experiences. Many times our parents or the environment where we grew up taught us to feel anxious or nervous all the time. We may have been raised in an environment where we were always afraid, or were taught to constantly worry about everything. The problem is how we think.
Every single thought we have is energy. And energy can only be transferred, meaning it has to go somewhere. And our beliefs decide how strong the energy is. If an experience happens, and we believe it to be life-threatening, that will have a very profound effect on our body. This is because we believe – based on what we see and perceive – something to be true that could kill us. This causes our body to have a severe reaction. Lets say you are driving with someone in a car and you are going up to a stop light but he is not stopping. You start to freak out because you are afraid you are about to hit.
Your whole body tenses up and you have a strong reaction. Your friend in the backseat has driven with this person before and knows they always stop very late. So they know and believe that they are safe because they have driven with this person before and everything was fine. You are scared to death because you believe you are going to hit and maybe get killed. Your whole body is reacting and your adrenaline is pumping, but the person in the back is calmly reading a book, knowing that he is safe. Your thoughts are what caused your body to react the way it did.
Your thoughts are the energy that power your feelings. If you knew that this person was going to stop the car, you would feel much less anxiousness and would probably be the same way as the friend in the backseat, but because you believed you could possibly die at that time your body jumped into gear to protect you. It is our primitive protector. It is what controls our feelings. It takes in our perceptions and primitively makes a decision on how we feel.
So if you accept that your thoughts decide how you feel, then now think about your own thoughts. Think about what you currently worry about right now. Think about all the negative thoughts. What is it you are anxious about? And then realize what you are thinking. Maybe you are worrying about what people will think of you and the possible outcomes of that. Maybe you are worrying that you might be in danger in some situation. Maybe you are worried about your body or your current health. It does not matter what it is. The point is the thoughts and beliefs are what is causing the problems. If you were to think all day “My Stomach Hurts” and that is the only thing you were to think about all day, then I guarantee you by the end of the day your stomach would feel miserable. And the more you believed it the more it would hurt.
Take a hypochondriac for example. They always think they are sick and they believe it. And because of that their body responds by making itself sick by either altering the immune system to be more susceptible to disease, or physically feeling bad based on what they are thinking.
And then take the opposite example. The incredible optimistic person. The kind of person who always sees the good in everything and always thinks and feels positively. The kind of person who always believes in the good in everything. They always feel good! And they really do feel good. All of their positive thoughts about their body and their surroundings has the effect of creating those positive feelings. And because of that they feel great all the time.
So how hypnosis helps is by helping to change your beliefs and change your thinking. You cannot do one without doing the other. And that is where hypnosis for anxiety comes in.
Anxiety Hypnosis helps you to change your thinking and the way you feel. You will discover that you can easily change the way you feel with hypnosis. That is the first difference you can make. It will instantly make a difference on the first session. You will notice a positive difference even with a few sessions and by the end of a series of sessions you will be discovering a new way of being.
Keep in mind that an anxiety hypnosis program has to be designed to help a person change the way they think, otherwise there would only be short-term results. You would do one or two sessions, thinking your anxiety was gone, and then it would come back later and you would be disappointed. But if the hypnosis program was designed properly to help you alter your thinking in addition to the way you feel each day, then you have a recipe for true, positive change.
So if you are considering a hypnosis program for your anxiety, make sure it is well designed by someone who works with clients with anxieties, fears and phobias on a full time basis, so that you’ll achieve all that is possible with hypnosis.
