Is anxiety a mental illness or just a normal emotion? How I treat Anxiety in my Worthing Hypnotherapy Practice

I have seen a lot of people over the years experiencing anxiety, and I can confidently say that there was nothing wrong with most of them. Each person seeking therapy had just learned to think in unhelpful ways, or they'd become scared of their thoughts and feelings. When working with my clients, I prefer to use the term emotional well-being rather than mental health or mental illness.

Fight Or Flight Is Not A Useful Understanding Of Anxiety

Anxiety is commonly explained and therefore understood as your fight or flight response. This is technically true at a biological level, but how useful is this understanding? How many of the situations that make you feel anxious can be made better with violence or running away?

• If you experience social anxiety and then begin ploughing into parties with fists blazing, is that going to help? You're more likely to have attempted running away, but that doesn't solve anything apart from not having to endure that specific event.

• If you really need to change jobs, but interviews make you anxious...nobody anywhere is suggesting that attacking the interviewer as a good coping mechanism, and running away...you get the picture.

Anxiety Is A Friendly Warning System

So I like to reframe anxiety as a friendly warning system: “If this happens, we are going to look like a fool.” “If that happens, no one is ever going to talk to me again.” “If that happens, the world is going to end.”

Now, sometimes the warning is useful, in which case: “Fantastic, thanks, now what do I need to do to prevent it or to prepare myself to cope?” There's no need to be overwhelmed by the warning. Sometimes, though, the warning is wrong – in which case there's no need to be overwhelmed by it.

You Don't Have To 'Suffer' Anxiety

Everyone experiences anxiety in some way at some times, but a key difference between those who suffer from anxiety and those who just experience it is that those who suffer mistake the warning thoughts and feelings for reality – the thoughts themselves become frightening.

Those who do not suffer just receive the thoughts and feelings as information that they may or may not need to act upon.

• Either way, where's the mental illness? The mind is working just fine.

Anxiety Is A Learned Concept, Not A Universal Experience

The other point here is that we all experience anxiety differently. Anxiety is not a specific feeling or universal experience. Some people experience it as hot prickly heat, and others as a churning sensation in the gut. Some people experience anxiety by fixating on the past, while others are entirely future-oriented.

If your concept of anxiety is fight or flight, but neither one of those responses is appropriate, then you will get stuck in fight or flight, and your whole world will seem scary as you keep scanning for a threat that is not there.

If your concept of anxiety is a mental illness, then you will feel incredibly disempowered and helpless.

If your concept of anxiety is that it's a message that may or may not be useful, then you can feel safe listening to that message in order to decide without spiralling, escalation or overwhelm. How much more empowering does that feel?

• I saw a client once who was put in a horrible situation for a long time. They felt trapped and, therefore, started feeling more and more anxious. They were then diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, heavily medicated, and the anxiety got worse. They didn't have a disorder – they were in an unhealthy situation and needed to change the situation. There was nothing wrong with them; they were just not receiving the message to change their job. In this case, the message was both true AND useful, and acting on it quickly would have prevented years of anxiety. Being led to believe they were ill made it all scarier and made them feel powerless.

• I see a lot of clients who experience anxiety because of experiences in the past. Life now is perfectly safe and secure, but it didn't used to be. In these cases, the anxiety isn't useful information. It's outdated. It might have been useful once, but not anymore. When they still fear those feelings, though they remain on the run, even though there is nothing to run from. If they can feel safe with those uncomfortable but incorrect feelings, then their brain will learn that the anxiety is no longer necessary.

Working With Clients Experiencing Anxiety

• Change The Concept

So when I am working with anxious clients (or any other excessive emotion), my primary job is to change their concept of the emotion to something more empowering, or at least less disempowering.

~If you can be comfortable with uncomfortable feelings ~

~ stay focussed on how you want to feel ~

~ and get your story right in your mind, you'll do fine ~

• Break Down Fear Loops

Reacting to the anxious thoughts and feelings with fear will perpetuate them. Once the concept is changed, the emotion that has felt overwhelming for too long will feel less scary. When you're more comfortable with uncomfortable feelings such as anxiety, you will react to your thoughts and feelings differently. You can feel safer listening to the warning in order to decide: Is it telling you something correct or incorrect? Something useful or not useful right now? You can start to experience your thoughts and feelings as information instead of reality. This, in turn, enables you to do something with the information to avoid harm or decide that the information is harmless. Either way, overwhelm is no longer necessary.

• Build familiarity with more desired feelings

When you have lived with strong anxiety for a long time, it is easy to lose familiarity with feelings such as happiness and safety. While we are disempowering anxious thoughts and feelings, I like to help clients re-familiarise themselves with positive feelings and therefore strengthen their ability to create positive mindsets. The more familiar you are with how you want to feel, the more you'll notice those feelings, the easier they are to hang on to when you do notice them, and the easier they are to create.

• Change The Story

Your life is a story that you tell yourself. Some parts of that story are excellent, and some parts are not working. When you mistake the narrative that is not working as your reality, you are likely to suffer. Anxiety that is incorrect or not useful is an unhelpful part of your story, so hypnosis can be a great way to change that anxious story so that your experience changes.

If you or anyone you know is suffering from anxiety, please feel free to contact me for a friendly, no-obligation chat.