Anxiety and stress are common reasons for seeking hypnotherapy. Both conditions are different aspects of a fear response that is working inappropriately.
Anxiety is the negative feeling you experience when worried about something that you think may happen. Everyone has experienced feeling anxious about a forthcoming event, such as a test or an awkward social occasion. Examples of common types of anxiety are:
- Social anxiety - fear of social situations and interacting with other people
- Performance anxiety - fear of carrying out an activity in front of others
- Driving anxiety - fear of driving a car
- Test anxiety - fear of taking a test
Stress is closely linked to anxiety. Stress is a pressure or group of pressures that are too much for that person to cope with comfortably. What is considered as stressful will differ from person to person. Whilst one person might look forward to planning a social event, another person might feel overwhelmed and view the situation as stressful.
There are many stressful events that people have to cope with in their lives, for example: death of a loved one, breakdown of a relationship, divorce, job loss, financial problems and illness. Even events that people view as positive can cause stress, such as pregnancy, a new child or retirement. Stress can result from good or bad changes at home, work, school or college.
Fear evolved to protect us
Anxiety and stress have their basis in the body’s inbuilt fear response. In our evolutionary past our ancestors needed to able to respond immediately to danger from animals or enemies. The fight-or-flight response evolved as an effective survival mechanism when a threat appeared.
The fight-or-flight response occurs when we sense a threat. Our body releases a flood of hormones that immediately initiate the following sequence of events.
- Our muscles tense so we are ready to act.
- Our blood pressure increases to send more blood to our muscles and heart.
- Our heart beats faster to cope with the increased demands for more blood.
- We breathe faster so that oxygen gets into our blood faster.
- We shut down our digestion to divert more blood to our arms and legs.
- Our mouth dries, our kidney, intestine and bladder functions slow down, and our bladder and anus start to relax.
- We sweat to cool ourselves.
These bodily changes enable us to cope with the threat, either by fighting or running away. Once we have taken action and the threat is over, our body returns to its usual state and the stress hormones are eliminated or neutralised. This fight-or-flight system has proven an effective survival mechanism for millions of years.
Fear response too extreme for today’s challenges
However, the challenges we face today are usually not life-threathening. We may now feel psychologically threatened by a critical boss, but that is not a real danger like a wild animal. Unfortunately the primitive part of our brain that turns on the fight-or-flight response cannot distinguish between different types of threat, nor between real and imagined threats. So the fight-or-flight response can be switched on for a psychological threat, such as a criticism from the boss, or an imagined threat, such as thinking of danger to a loved one.
But fighting or running away are inappropriate responses to our present day psychological threats. So these hormones still arouse our body, but instead of using them up in fighting or fleeing, we now experience this undischarged arousal as the symptoms of anxiety and stress.
Fear dumbs us down
The fight-or-flight response also turns off the thinking part of our brains. This made sense in our evolutionary past. Because when a wild animal is attacking you do not have the time to carefully analyse the situation, you need to fight or flee immediately.
We have two parts of our brains, the thinking brain and the emotional brain. The emotional brain is much older in evolutionary terms. It is involved in instinctive responses, especially the fight-or-flight response.
In everyday life the two parts of the brain work together. The thinking brain puts the emotional brain’s raw feeling into perspective. So, for example, we usually restrain ourselves from hitting someone who makes us angry. But the emotional brain can overpower the thinking brain.
When we perceive a threat the emotional brain takes over. It shuts off the thinking brain. Which means we are not thinking straight when the fight-or-flight response is activated. Our options become limited to a simple choice between fight or flight. And we are programmed to take action before our thinking brain knows about it. So, fear dumbs us down to save our life.
But most of the challenges we face today are not life-threathening. Which means that the fear feelings are not discharged by action and so the emotional arousal continues to turn down the thinking brain. We experience this when we have prepared well for a test but become anxious on the day and find our mind goes blank, unable to access the information we know we have already learned.
Fear causes black-and-white thinking
When fear is operating the emotional brain shuts down part of the thinking brain. We are then less well able to plan, to put things into perspective, to call upon our memories and experiences. Instead we rely on crude black-or-white thinking. We take a viewpoint that is limited, excluding wider possibilities or options. So we might think that a situation is overwheming, that we cannot possibly cope.
However, when the challenge has gone and our thinking brain is fully switched on again, we may see that there were various options available to us. We just could not see them at the time.
Hypnotherapy can help
Hypnotherapy has developed a number of effective approaches to deal with anxiety and stress. Hypnosis creates a receptive state of mind in which the client can learn how to deal with challenges in a more creative and healthy way.