Anyone who ever had a panic attack knows how terrifying it can be…
Imagine that you can’t breathe… while panic is taking control over your body… and you feel the air from your lungs is just disappearing while you are unsuccessfully fighting for your breath… for your life… and everything is slowly beginning to fade to black while you feel how your life is slowly shutting down… forever…
Do you want to get rid of this awful feeling?
Do you want it gone and never come back again?
Overcome anxiety and forget that you ever had a panic attack, easily and completely naturally with the help of hypnotherapy.
What to know about anxiety
Anxiety is a normal and often healthy emotion. However, when a person regularly feels disproportionate levels of anxiety, it might become a medical disorder.
Anxiety disorders form a category of mental health diagnoses that lead to excessive nervousness, fear, apprehension, and worry
These disorders alter how a person processes emotions and behaves, also causing physical symptoms. Mild anxiety might be vague and unsettling, while severe anxiety may seriously affect day-to-day living.
Anxiety disorders affect 40 million people in the United States. It is the most common group of mental illnesses in the country. However, only 36.9 percent of people with an anxiety disorder receive treatment.
What is anxiety?
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines anxiety as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure.”
Knowing the difference between normal feelings of anxiety and an anxiety disorder requiring medical attention can help a person identify and treat the condition.
In this article, we look at the differences between anxiety and anxiety disorder, the different types of anxiety, and the available treatment options.
When does anxiety need treatment?
While anxiety can cause distress, it is not always a medical condition.
Anxiety
When an individual faces potentially harmful or worrying triggers, feelings of anxiety are not only normal but necessary for survival.
Since the earliest days of humanity, the approach of predators and incoming danger sets off alarms in the body and allows evasive action. These alarms become noticeable in the form of a raised heartbeat, sweating, and increased sensitivity to surroundings.
The danger causes a rush of adrenalin, a hormone and chemical messenger in the brain, which in turn triggers these anxious reactions in a process called the “fight-or-flight response. This prepares humans to physically confront or flee any potential threats to safety.
For many people, running from larger animals and imminent danger is a less pressing concern than it would have been for early humans. Anxieties now revolve around work, money, family life, health, and other crucial issues that demand a person’s attention without necessarily requiring the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction.
The nervous feeling before an important life event or during a difficult situation is a natural echo of the original ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction. It can still be essential to survival – anxiety about being hit by a car when crossing the street, for example, means that a person will instinctively look both ways to avoid danger.
Anxiety disorders
The duration or severity of an anxious feeling can sometimes be out of proportion to the original trigger, or stressor. Physical symptoms, such as increased blood pressure and nausea, may also develop. These responses move beyond anxiety into an anxiety disorder.
The APA describes a person with an anxiety disorder as “having recurring intrusive thoughts or concerns.” Once anxiety reaches the stage of a disorder, it can interfere with daily function.
Symptoms of Anxiety
While a number of different diagnoses constitute anxiety disorders, the symptoms of a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) will often include the following:
- restlessness, and a feeling of being “on-edge”
- uncontrollable feelings of worry
- increased irritability
- concentration difficulties
- sleep difficulties, such as problems in falling or staying asleep
While these symptoms might be normal to experience in daily life, people with GAD will experience them to persistent or extreme levels. GAD may present as vague, unsettling worry or more severe anxiety that disrupts day-to-day living.
Types of Anxiety
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders: Fifth Edition (DSM-V) classifies anxiety disorders into several main types.
In previous editions of DSM, anxiety disorders including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as an acute stress disorder. However, the manual now no longer groups these mental health difficulties under anxiety.
Anxiety disorders now include the following diagnoses.
Generalized anxiety disorder: This is a chronic disorder involving excessive, long-lasting anxiety and worries about nonspecific life events, objects, and situations. GAD is the most common anxiety disorder, and people with the disorder are not always able to identify the cause of their anxiety.
Panic disorder: Brief or sudden attacks of intense terror and apprehension characterize the panic disorder. These attacks can lead to shaking, confusion, dizziness, nausea, and breathing difficulties. Panic attacks tend to occur and escalate rapidly, peaking after 10 minutes. However, a panic attack might last for hours.
Panic disorders usually occur after frightening experiences or prolonged stress but may also occur without a trigger. An individual experiencing a panic attack may misinterpret it as a life-threatening illness and may make drastic changes in behavior to avoid future attacks.
Specific phobia: This is an irrational fear and avoidance of a particular object or situation. Phobias are not like other anxiety disorders, as they relate to a specific cause.
A person with a phobia might acknowledge fear as illogical or extreme but remain unable to control feelings of anxiety around the trigger. Triggers for a phobia range from situations and animals to everyday objects.
Agoraphobia: This is a fear and avoidance of places, events, or situations from which it may be difficult to escape or in which help would not be available if a person becomes trapped. People often misunderstand this condition as a phobia of open spaces and the outdoors, but it is not so simple. A person with agoraphobia may have a fear of leaving home or using elevators and public transport.
Selective mutism: This is a form of anxiety that some children experience, in which they are not able to speak in certain places or contexts, such as school, even though they may have excellent verbal communication skills around familiar people. It may be an extreme form of social phobia.
Social anxiety disorder, or social phobia: This is a fear of negative judgment from others in social situations or of public embarrassment. Social anxiety disorder includes a range of feelings, such as stage fright, a fear of intimacy, and anxiety around humiliation and rejection.
This disorder can cause people to avoid public situations and human contact to the point that everyday living is rendered extremely difficult.
Separation anxiety disorder: High levels of anxiety after separation from a person or place that provides feelings of security or safety characterize separation anxiety disorder. Separation might sometimes result in panic symptoms.
Causes of Anxiety
The causes of anxiety disorders are complicated. Many might occur at once, some may lead to others, and some might not lead to an anxiety disorder unless another is present.
Possible causes include:
- environmental stressors, such as difficulties at work, relationship problems, or family issues
- genetics, as people who have family members with an anxiety disorder, are more likely to experience one themselves
- medical factors, such as the symptoms of a different disease, the effects of a medication, or the stress of an intensive surgery or prolonged recovery
- brain chemistry, as psychologists define many anxiety disorders as misalignments of hormones and electrical signals in the brain
- withdrawal from an illicit substance, the effects of which might intensify the impact of other possible causes
“Medication treats symptoms. Hypnotherapy treats causes.”
What Makes Hypnotherapy so Effective in Treating Anxiety and Stress?
We are addressing the underlying emotions that feed the anxiety. Effective hypnotherapy can quickly, usually in the first session, get right down to the source of the client’s anxiety through age regression work. In the hypnotherapy session, we always begin with the current situation or triggering events in the client’s life. So perhaps they describe becoming extremely anxious when facing a public speaking engagement or having to go in front of their professional board for an oral exam, having to speak to their boss or performing in a sporting event.
1.) We start with the feelings that they experience before the performance begins.
The feelings that feed the anxiety are quite often fear, panic and shame. Then we ask where are these feelings located in the body. Perhaps they say in my chest or stomach. We then have them express these feelings to relieve some of the stress from their body. This is the main component in what makes hypnotherapy so effective. The majority of counselors and therapists have been taught to try to treat the feelings by talking about them with the client. Talking about feelings does not release or resolve or relieve them because emotions are not located in the brain. They are located in the body.
2.) Now we ask the anxious client to regress back to one of the first times they had these same or similar feelings of performance anxiety.
Because we have hypnotized the client, we are actually addressing the subconscious mind and requesting that it bring to the awareness of the client the missing pieces of the puzzle of their anxiety. The subconscious mind is a huge reservoir of information, exactly like the memory chip in your computer. It stores a vast amount of information about patterns in your life and it can be accessed easily through hypnotherapy.
3.) We use the exact same situation of the client-facing performance and then experiencing anxiety.
Combined with the feelings of (for example) fear which is described as tightness in the stomach, the feeling of panic may be sweating and the feeling of shame indicated by the person putting their hand over their eyes or face to hide the blushing. And when the client regresses to a similar situation it is often in their childhood.
So keeping with our example of performance anxiety, perhaps the subconscious mind takes our client to age 12 where he is asked to present something in front of the class at school. He reports that his teacher begins to yell at him because he did the wrong assignment. And then the other children start laughing at him and calling him names. He then may regress even younger to age five when he wet his pants in kindergarten and his teacher shamed and embarrassed him in front of the whole class.
4.) Now in the hypnotherapy session, we are able to assist that five-year-old boy to create a different experience.
He can tell the teacher that it hurts his feelings when she speaks to him like that, and tell her to never do that again. Ever! He can recognize that his best friend in the class is not laughing at him or mocking him, and he can find comfort in his friend’s loving support. Incredibly, the relief that the five-year-old experiences actually relieves the adult’s anxiety and bolsters his self-confidence.
The beauty of hypnotherapy is that we can follow the bridge that takes us through the life of the person and right to the sources of dysfunctional patterns and anxiety.
Hypnotherapy treats the complete mind, body, and emotions as one complete package, and we can do that all at the same time.
By going down to the source of the anxiety we are rooting it out. It’s as if you wanted to get the weeds out of your garden and you did so by cutting the upper part of the weed down to the soil. Now we all know that by doing that, we have not gotten to the root of the weed and it will certainly grow back very soon! Find the roots of the symptoms in a person’s life today and resolve it once and for all.
Do you think you need help with anxiety?