If you’ve ever felt anxiety, you know that it is a full body experience. Often times the mind is racing as fast as the heart, the chest is tight, breathing is shallow, and every muscle in your body feels tense.
For some it only shows up in social situations. For others it holds them back in their relationship or career. And for a few, it’s completely debilitating to the point that it’s a struggle to even leave the house.
This full body experience is the result of your brain sending signals to your autonomic nervous system that there is danger. Your autonomic nervous system will then signal a dozen or so different systems in the body to engage a sympathetic state –in other words, put you in “Fight or Flight”.
This is when you start to feel that anxiety bubbling up and taking over. Your breath becomes rapid and shallow, your heart beats faster, you might become fixated on finding the exit or simply running away.
Anxiety, especially when it becomes severe, limits us in many ways. But when we seek help, it seems there is just one solution: coping skills.
Coping strategies for Anxiety
It seems that as a whole, we have decided that the best way to address anxiety is to use coping strategies to bring the body back from the onset of anxiety. Most coping mechanisms aim to bring your nervous system back into a parasympathetic state (into “Rest and Digest” and out of ‘Fight or Flight”) so that you can calm yourself down.
A lot of these coping skills work really well! The only problem is they aren’t targeting the real problem.
I work with clients with the understanding that anxiety is not something we are born with, it’s something we develop. And with this understanding I know that coping skills (although they have a place) do not address the core issue.
In sessions my focus with my clients is to resolve the root-cause of their anxiety.
The term “Root-Cause” refers to the core issue. It’s asking the question “What causes the anxiety?”.
The part that’s really tricky for those that suffer from anxiety is that it seems like anxiety is the problem –but it’s not the problem. Anxiety is a symptom of an underlying problem.
Discovering and resolving that underlying problem will significantly decrease the experience of anxiety and therefor, the need to use coping skills –because without an underlying problem, there are no symptoms!
If you can resolve the cause of your anxiety, then your symptoms naturally fade away.
How to get to the Root-Cause of Anxiety
Using Hypnotherapy as a tool to access the core issue, my clients usually see a shift in their anxiety right away. This is because Hypnotherapy allows us to connect directly with the subconscious mind –which is the part of the mind that stores all of our memories, negative and positive associations, stored emotion, and experiences.
Hypnosis induces a trance state. This means that it slows down your brainwaves from Alpha and Beta down into Theta. When you are in Theta, you are in a trance state and have better access to your subconscious mind because you no longer have to filter through the conscious mind (that uses logic, reason and rational thinking).
When we are in a state of hypnosis, we can more easily access our memories and emotions emotion, and because of this, we can discover the Root-Cause of anxiety in as little as one session.
So you might be wondering what exactly we discover in hypnosis. We discover a lot of emotion, usually.
Anxiety is a symptom of… (drumroll please)… feeling unsafe.
No matter what kind of anxiety you’ve been diagnosed with or where it shows up in your life, it usually stems from not feeling safe. Not feeling physically safe; not feeling safe to be yourself; not feeling safe to make mistakes or be imperfect, etc.
Usually this feeling of being unsafe happened early on in life. It could have stemmed from an abusive or neglecting parent, high standards that you could never live up to, or a whole host of other experiences.
Whatever the case may be, when we discover the Root-Cause of anxiety, it usually takes us back to a time early in life when you felt unsafe.
At an early age, that feeling felt really big and scary. For that reason, you weren’t able to process that emotion at that time. So what does your mind do with emotion that feels too big? It stores it in the subconscious.
And that underlying feeling of being unsafe bubbles up in different ways all through our life.
The symptoms we experience have been called “Anxiety”, but the core issue is feeling unsafe.
When we feel unsafe (even if we don’t consciously understand that’s what it is) our autonomic nervous system kicks into “Fight or Flight” and we call this experience “anxiety”.
Permanently heal Anxiety by getting to the Root-Cause
Resolving the underlying issue of feeling unsafe is the only way to permanently break the cycle of anxiety.
Over a lifetime of feeling anxious, anxiety becomes a habit in the mind, and we begin to associate certain things with the experience of anxiety.
This is why after resolving the root-cause of the anxiety, we can then start to retrain your brain to feel safe when it usually feels anxious.
This is when coping skills come in really handy because we’ve released the core issue and now we can focus on reconditioning your brain to feel safe.
And all of this can happen over the course of just a few sessions. Your mind is the most powerful tool you have. When you harness that power, there is nothing you can’t do.
If you struggle with anxiety and this article has resonated with you, feel free to schedule a free 30-minute consultation to speak with me directly about how Hypnotherapy can help you heal the root of your anxiety. This is a no-obligation consultation where you can ask me anything and I can explain the process and what to expect. Schedule your free consultation here.
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