What is the anxiety cycle?
More and more people are feeling anxious now, we all know those around us who are suffering and maybe you also notice it in yourself. And the effect is cumulative as people remain stuck in the anxiety cycle, avoiding things they feel anxious about, finding they have a temporary spike of endorphins as they manage to avoid it (whatever ‘it’ is, big or small) but then feeling worse over time as their world becomes smaller and more and more things need to be avoided to keep them feeling safe. Sound familiar?
Anxiety is designed to help us when we feel unsafe because of a threatening physical issue – a car is veering towards you or you’re going to be swept out to sea, it pumps your body with chemicals to allow you to take action. But when the feeling of unsafety arises from thoughts and you are physically safe, your body still pumps through those chemicals and you feel very uncomfortable. Often avoiding the issue seems the best way through. Unfortunately over time rather than feeling better, the feelings of anxiety and its negative impact on your life increases.
Breaking the cycle
So how can we break the cycle? The first step is to notice when you’re in it. The next to release yourself from its grasp. See my blog posts about grounding and bilateral stimulation for some ideas to take yourself out of the grip of anxiety so you’re then able to choose how you want to be and what you want to do next. Simply shaking the emotion out of you, or dancing are all good ways to disassociate yourself from the emotion. Paradoxically going into the emotion deeply will actually release it too, this can seem really difficult at first until you learn to trust the process. All our emotions are there to signal things to us and are our friends.
Once you have disassociated from the anxiety and are feeling calmer, you can now choose how to be and what you want to do. You can manage yourself in taking action towards the event or stimulus that was causing you anxiety. This can be challenging at first but over time the stimulus lessens its effect on you and so your stress levels lower as you move out of the cycle and into personal empowerment.
What’s the origin of the anxiety?
It all starts with a thought, the thought creates feelings which create chemical reactions in the body which you feel as physical sensations. Often we’re unaware of the thought.
I’ve been working with a lot of people who are experiencing anxiety recently and once with RTT hypnotherapy they’re able to see where the thoughts originate from and choose to let those thoughts go and no longer associate with them, my clients see themselves as empowered and confident with great coping skills. This has been really liberating for many.
One teenage boy I worked with earlier this year who, prior to working with me, had anxiety levels of 9 (10 being completely unable to cope and the worst disaster) and frequent panic attacks and was becoming increasingly anxious being with small groups of friends, experienced my one month care package recently. He’s now told me he’s enjoying hanging out with his friends again and he’s looking forward to an upcoming camp (which previously had been a real trigger) and he’s had none of the physical symptoms he’d had previously. He said his anxiety levels were now about 4 and he felt he could manage them.
The reason RTT helps so effectively is that it allows you to get back to the underlying belief which has created the anxiety and replace it with other more empowering beliefs which, through the transformation recording, can be rewired in your brain so they’re naturally your thoughts. Then stopping the anxiety cycle becomes easy and taking action in new areas that were previously scary and felt unsafe is comfortable and automatic.
As Marissa Peer, who I trained with, says, your beliefs make you, who not make them amazing?
Enjoy your day 🙂