Anxiety is a word used to describe feelings of uncertainty, hesitation, nervousness or fear and is usually context related.
Before treatment the first question we ask someone who tells us they 'have anxiety' is usually, 'how do you know when to be anxious?'
Some feel anxiety when talking to strangers, some feel anxiety when giving presentations, some get anxiety driving on a motorway. A few will say they get anxious feelings all the time.
Anxiety has a pattern
There is, in our experience, always a pattern to anxiety, it is not random. It is often associated with depression. The way we help stop anxiety is to treat it as a learned behaviour. Indeed, it is said that the only two fears humans are born with are those of loud noises and falling - the rest are learned (albeit unwittingly).
Because the human brain learns so quickly, it is often possible to literally rapidly 're-condition' the learned response of anxiety or depression so that the next time the person is in a situation which previously made them feel bad (anxious), instead they feel more resourceful and capable.
As with the majority of treatment we do with our clients, our approach to help you stop anxiety is threefold.
- We spend time looking and listening to the person to determine how the patterns of 'anxiety', the thinking/feeling manifest themselves. This also applies to depression as a result of continued anxious feelings.
- We then work consciously to begin to help build flexibility in the way the person thinks about things, the way they remember the past and imagine the future, the way they talk to themselves, and literally the way they experience the world.
- We work unconsciously (hypnosis) to help the person to gain flexibility in their behaviour, to build with suggestion, metaphor and conditioning new resources, and to connect the person with the resources they almost invariably have but have been unable to access during the 'anxiety'.
How long will it take to treat my anxiety?
By using this sort of treatment, we expect to usually be able to demonstrate a useful difference in a person's thinking in just one session, and the average total number of hour-long sessions needed to help stop 'anxiety' is between two and four. Chronic depression problems will take longer to resolve.
