What Is The Best Natural Way To Reduce Anxiety?

Anxiety can feel like all is lost, but one of my key messages of hope to anyone finding their way to this article is that your anxiety is a natural and safe process of the mind and body. I am not trying to say that it can't get out of hand, though. If you are reading this, you probably know that it can.

To experience flutterings of anxiety that only last a few seconds or minutes is the norm. Perhaps an occasional, mild anxious feeling that lasts for the duration of a situation cannot be avoided. Anxiety doesn't need to be intense enough to hold you back in life, but it sometimes does.

Please take some encouragement from this: when anxiety gets out of hand, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you; it just means your relationship with those anxious thoughts and feelings needs some work. I know this as I have helped hundreds of people feel significantly less anxious since 2011.

You 'suffer' with anxiety when you begin to fear your anxious thoughts and feelings. That fear can increase the anxious feeling exponentially.

The best natural way to reduce anxiety is therefore to teach your brain that no matter how uncomfortable they are, those thoughts and feelings are no threat to you. The key to good emotional well-being is to be more comfortable with your own uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

How Do You Step Out Of The Anxiety Fear Loop?

A favourite Carl Jung quote of mine goes like this: “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”

If you are experiencing excessive and unnecessary anxiety, you have probably got many years of experience trying to push it away, trying to ignore it, trying to argue with it. You've probably learned that anxiety is your fight or flight response, but you also realise that neither fighting nor running away is going to help here, so what the hell else are you supposed to do?

Another quote that has defined the way I live my life is: “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you've always got,” which I believe was Henry Ford's.

If resisting is not working, and fighting or running away is not helping, then it's time to do something different.

In practice, I use hypnosis and thought experiments to help people see the illusory nature of their thoughts and feelings.

Anxiety is usually a fear response to a memory of something that happened or an imagined future where something goes wrong. That thought of the future or the past determines how you feel in the moment. That thought may be a conscious thought, or it could be a subconscious thought. Whichever it is, anxiety is your imagination experienced as reality.

This is something that needs to be explored carefully and sensitively, but the thought of a traumatic event is not the traumatic event. A traumatic event was a very real threat, but the thought of that event is no threat at all. The thought of something horrible happening tomorrow is not the same as something horrible happening tomorrow; the thought of something horrible happening is not a threat. If such thoughts are experienced with anxiety, then you are experiencing your imagination as real, and understanding how this illusion works can disempower those thoughts considerably, so your nervous system can stand down.

This might make perfect sense to you in your rational mind, but if you are experiencing excessive and unnecessary anxiety, then you do not understand it in your full system. Therapeutic Hypnosis is about teaching you this with embodied experiences.

Words

A zombie is an undead creature that feasts on human flesh, and its bite is infectious, as it will turn you into the same. Zombies are dangerous. No matter how dangerous zombies are, the word ZOMBIE is perfectly safe. The word ZOMBIE is not an undead creature that feasts on human flesh. There is no threat to you from the word ZOMBIE. If there were, The Walking Dead franchise would never have been so popular.

Images

No matter how dangerous zombies are, an image of a zombie on a poster, TV screen or in your mind is perfectly safe. An image of a zombie is not an undead creature that feasts on human flesh. There is no threat to you from the image of a zombie. If there were, The Walking Dead franchise would never have been so popular.

Sensations

You can imagine how scared you would be if you were to meet a real zombie. If you couldn't, the franchise would not have been so popular – the horror film industry, games, and theme park experiences, to name but a few, do very well out of making us feel afraid. A lot of people enjoy the fear experience. If you do not, it is because you are afraid of it. If the fear experience was a threat, these entertainment experiences would not be so popular.

What Is Anxiety?

Your anxiety is a feeling that reacts to words or images in your mind as if they are a threat. Your anxiety is the resistance to those thoughts and that feeling.

If you are interested in exploring this illusion in order to reduce all excessive and unnecessary anxiety in your life, then I'd love to hear from you. Click through for my contact details for hypnosis in Worthing. If not, I hope this has given you some great food for thought.

FAQs

1. What is the fastest natural way to reduce anxiety?

The fastest natural way to reduce anxiety is to stop treating the feeling as a threat. When you allow anxious thoughts and sensations to exist without resisting them, the nervous system often settles down on its own. Therapeutic hypnosis can help train your brain to respond to anxiety in a calmer way.

2. Can anxiety be cured naturally?

Many people significantly reduce or even eliminate excessive anxiety by changing their relationship with their thoughts and feelings. When the brain learns that anxious sensations are not dangerous, the fear response no longer needs to activate so strongly. Natural approaches such as therapeutic hypnosis can help train your brain to respond to anxiety in a calmer way.

3. Why does my anxiety feel so real?

Anxiety feels real because your brain reacts to imagined threats in the same way it reacts to real ones. A vivid memory or future scenario can trigger the same fight-or-flight response as an actual danger. Understanding this can help you recognise that the thought itself is not the threat.

4. How can I calm anxiety without medication?

Many people calm anxiety without medication by learning skills that regulate the nervous system and change how they respond to anxious thoughts. Therapeutic hypnosis can help train your brain to respond to anxiety in a calmer way.