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Anxiety can affect anyone, even celebrities

Revealing anxiety

More and more people are opening up about their anxiety issues but it is still an issue that many people don’t either recognise or feel comfortable talking about.

Celebrity Caroline Flack has recently talked about how she is using Hypnotherapy to help her deal with the anxiety of performing.

From the article:

The Love Island presenter said she struggles with anxiety more when she has free time between jobs.

‘Weirdly the anxiety I got more when I’m not working,” she explained. “Work takes away my anxiety, doing live TV takes away anything else. Being on stage I’m less nervous than just being me.”

Caroline was explaining how anxiety affects everyone differently, she is impacted when her mind is free and has time to think. Other people are the complete opposite and suffer from anxiety when they are under pressure.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/hypnotherapy-caroline-flack-anxiety-chicago-a8693066.html

Trauma / Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) Therapy

After having one of the following happen to you:-

A car crash, work accident, violent assault, burglary, sports injury, sexual assault, victim of a crime, major or minor surgery, breakdown of a relationship, death of someone close to you.

After which you experience several of the following:-

Sleepless nights, negative thoughts in your head, feeling that you are not in control, feeling scared or sad, frightening memories, a sense of constant danger, unable to trust people, panic attacks, restlessness, numb, disconnected, anger or mood swings.

You may also be thinking:-

Why is this happening to me?

I shouldn’t feel like this.

I should be able to sort this out myself.

Am I going out of my mind?.

When a really negative event happens it can change the way we feel and sometimes from that time onwards our mind and body can remain on a high state of alert awaiting future threats on a constant basis (even though we know that the event that caused it is in the past) and although we know that it is not necessary our body has been sensitised to react (actually to overreact) because it has not let go of the feeling of the threat of danger.

We are learning more and more that the body and mind store threatening events over your lifetime so that you can instantly react to protect yourself (and maybe save your life) but that sometimes it has not left certain negative events in the past so that you react inappropriately when there is not a threat.

Hypnotherapy (not to be confused with stage hypnosis) along with NLP, EFT, EMDR, Tapas Acupressure plus many other techniques can often rapidly change how you feel so that you let go of these negative thoughts and feelings and feel like you did before the event.

 I am seeing more clients over the past 10 years with negative symptoms that appear to have no cause and what is happening is that because of the pace of life (that is speeding up every year) plus the technologies that were not around 50 to 100 years ago such as cars, phones, computers, offices, TVs, etc. We are being overloaded by the world around us and at times it can cause our systems to overreact even to a minor event when in fact it was just “the straw that broke the camel’s back”

One of my clients while at work had (what he called) an “attack that came from out of the blue” and from that moment on he kept having them on a regular basis along with disrupted sleep patterns and negative thoughts and feelings.

He came to see me in desperation after almost two years of doctors, specialists and brain scans which showed nothing physically wrong. I explained to him that I had successfully treated many people over the years with symptoms similar to these caused by traumatic events or in this case (as in many others) something that happened out of the blue (for no apparent reason) and after only 3 to 4 sessions he was back to how he was before it happened and could not believe how much he had changed in so little time.

Trauma occurs when your negative feelings are pushed beyond a boundary or a limit and then stores as a permanent negative reaction. This is fine when  you see someone with a knife coming at you and  you instantly react and then the appropriate chemicals rush into your body to help you to fight or run (The fight or flight response), however  it can become a  problem when the body prepares for fight or flight when there is no immediate threat.

What takes place with PTSD, Trauma or related symptoms such as anxiety or panic attacks is that the initial trauma has stored and is now reacting to a trigger in the current moment such as an image, sound or smell (or a mixture of them) and is preparing the body to fight or run even when it is not appropriate. The chemicals that flood through the body in a life threatening situation as they prepare the body for danger (or perceived danger) lower or shut down your digestion, alter thinking processes and speed up your breathing which is exactly what the body requires in a dangerous situation but actually hinders you if you want to give a speech, visit certain places or perform in any way.

It is the nature of the human system to store over a lifetime those things in your life that are positive (pleasurable) and negative (unpleasurable) at a subconscious level so that you can act and react rapidly to pleasure and to threats appropriately without thinking.

However because of the complexities of modern daily life that never existed a century ago (cars, phones, TV, computers etc.) the natural balance of your system is being pushed much further than it used to be and many more people are now experiencing these negative states when they really know that they do not want to.

Most people realise and understand that a person having a serious car crash or someone returning from a war can suffer trauma or PTSD but they do not always understand why it does not go away with time or why someone who has not had a serious incident in their life has the same kind of reaction as a person that has been traumatised, but they rarely realise or understand that trauma and PTSD can also occur when many negative events build up over a period of time and then what seems like a small event “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” has the same consequences as a car crash or a war veteran would suffer.

What is happening in these cases is that the negative feelings are rather like an elastic band being stretched and while ordinarily it keeps returning back to it’s original shape at a certain point that last extra stretch “snaps” the elastic band so that it has permanently changed.

That last extra stretch could be something as simple as a bad virus, an illness, a bad day at work or problems with family members but when it has triggered what would normally be coped with causes the negative trigger to fire and continue to fire in response to even what seem to be minimal things from then onwards.

Thousands of people see Hypnotherapists like me all over the world every single day. One of the most common reasons why people go for Hypnotherapy is that they have tried other techniques without success and in some cases the only other option available was pills. Hypnosis, could change your life because it provides the emotional change and balancing of the subconscious mind that drives your behaviour.