As a hypnotherapist, it's often thought that helping people to stop smoking is the bulk of what I do. In fact, the most common issue I help people with is anxiety.
Here are 5 Ways to manage anxiety and how hypnotherapy can help.
1. Encourage You To Be More Mindful
If you can develop more of an ability to be in the present moment, often called mindfulness, rather than thinking about the past or future, you will likely experience a rapid reduction in your anxiety.
As far as we know, us humans are the only creatures to experience anxiety. Although animals experience fear, it's fairly safe to assume they don't get anxious, the reason being that they experience their lives in the present moment.
If you think about it - a cat doesn't go about her daily life fretting about what the other cats think of her, or worrying about what she did last week.
Hypnotherapy can enhance mindfulness by helping you to pay attention to the here and now and ease negative feelings.
2. Acknowledge & Use Your Inner Strengths
You might not think you have any strength, but take a few moments to think about the lessons that you've learned in your life, the difficulties you've bounced back from and the insights you've gained.
Chances are you have a huge number of inner strengths that you're not always consciously aware of, or haven't taken the time to think about. Difficult tasks such as learning to read and write are things that you have managed to do; it's quite amazing when you think about it. What else might you be capable of?
Hypnotherapy can help you to acknowledge and tap into inner strengths so that you can use them to help you in other situations, encouraging calm, confidence and control.
3. Play It Forward
Think about a future event that you're apprehensive about; as you imagine it, how does it go? I would bet money that if you are anxious about it, you imagine things going wrong. In doing this, you only reinforce the fear and anxiety.
The key is to play forward the event with a positive and enjoyable outcome.
Having hypnotherapy can help you to vividly imagine the event going well, leaving that as a lasting image in your subconscious, so you feel calmer and more confident that things will go well.
4. 'Unlearning' Negative Experiences
The past can leave an impact on us and often anxiety can have it's roots in experiences from when we were younger. Whatever lead to your anxiety, chances are you weren't born anxious, it's something you learned.
And if you can learn something, you can unlearn it too.
Hypnotherapy can take you through the process of unlearning and help you to begin to let go of the negative aspects.
5. Sit with your feelings
I often hear clients say that once they can accept anxious thoughts and feelings, instead of trying to battle against them, that the feelings start to subside.
What we resist, tends to persist, so trying not to think about how you feel will have the opposite effect.
By having hypnotherapy, you can learn to accept your thoughts and feelings as they arise, sitting with them, then allowing them to pass through you and dissipate.
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