Treating Anxiety
03/12/2008
As a practicing hypnotherapist in London, one of the questions I am always asked by clients is for proof that the unconscious mind is responsible for differing forms of anxiety.
I usually answer this by asking clients to consider how they respond in a cinema when they're watching a scary movie. As you may well appreciate, whilst you are absorbed into a scary movie, the typical reaction is for your heart to start beating faster, for you to feel slightly warmer and for the butterflies to arrive in your tummy. In fact, you will feel and act in way that's consistent with you being fearful.
But you're sitting in a cinema right? No one's running around with a knife or a gun. You entirely safe, yet your body is starting to go into what's known as fight or flight syndrome -- its preparing you to either fight off the danger or to run from it.
You see your unconscious mind has perceived danger and its regulating your body accordingly. Its ensuring that you have more oxygenated blood being taken into your primary organs (increased heart rate) and its increasing the temperature of all your muscles (feeling warm), and the butterflies in your tummy are testament to your body creating more adrenalin. All of this is the bodies way of preparing you to deal with the perceived threat.
But this has not been a conscious decision, right? It's not like you've have made the decision for these responses to occur. At a conscious level, you are aware that you are completely safe. The reason these responses occur is because your all powerful unconscious mind has decided that there is a very real threat and it is reacting accordingly. It has the ability to change your physiology based on a specific stimulus, i.e. fear.
Not only does this provide an indication of its power, but it also helps understand how easily our unconscious can be fooled in thinking there is a threat to be feared. This is the root of most anxiety based disorders -- the unconscious mind believing that there is a threat when in fact we are entirely safe.
Using hypnotherapy to help overcome anxiety is one of the simplest and most natural forms of treatment.
So if you would like to overcome your anxiety using hypnotherapy, call The Therapy Lounge now on 020 7485 5745 or click here to arrange a free, 30-minute, no obligation consultation. Call us - we really can help.