Fear & Anxiety

Here some questions about anxiety are answered.  There are also some links to anxiety pages with some useful checklists.  Please feel free to email me with any questions.

What is anxiety?

Anxiety is a normal human emotion that everyone experiences at times. Many people feel anxious, or nervous when faced with a problem at work, before taking a test, or making an important decision.  Anxiety disorders, however, can cause such distress that it interferes with a person’s ability to lead a normal life.  An anxiety disorder is a serious mental illness. For people with anxiety disorders, worry and fear are frequent or even constant and overwhelming, and can be crippling.

How does anxiety feel?

Anxiety has physical manifestations and feels a bit differently for each person.  Here are the most common symptoms of anxiety:

• Racing heart
• Stomachache or butterflies in the stomach feeling
• Excessive sweating, including palms, feet, etc
• Lightheadedness, dizziness
• Numbness or tingling in hands, arms, legs
• Watering eyes or uncontrollable crying
• Shortness of breath
• Feeling of choking
• Chest pains
• Chills or hot flashes
• Feeling stuck or frozen

 

**These are also symptoms of other issues, so please see your physician for a complete checkup and diagnosis.**

What kinds of anxiety are there?

There are several variations of anxiety.

Panic disorder: The sudden onset of a sense of terror, imminent danger, or the need to escape.  Sometimes, the onset may seem to occur for no particular reason, and sometimes, panic may be triggered by a certain place or situation or sensory experience such as hearing or smelling. Adaptations include avoidance of trigger places or situations, such as flying or the theater or a certain roadway.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): Thoughts or fears which occur so often that they occupy a great deal of the day and obstruct the ability to experience life without continuous concern for addressing the situations that create the thoughts and fears. The “obsession” refers to the thinking process or fear, such as fear of germs or overwhelming uncertainty about personal safety or safety of others, or even the need to affirm that objects are properly organized or stored. The adaptation to the thought or fear, which is to say the specific behavior deployed to correct or address the obsession, is the “compulsion.” Frequent hand-washing, checking blood pressure often, repeatedly affirming the location of people, and repeated confirmation that doors or locked or the coffee pot is off are all examples. The corrective behaviors frequently take the form of rituals which must be performed in a certain way to be regarded as effective.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): Excessive worry and tension which cannot be immediately related to a particular external cause or internal thoughts.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Persistent and frightening or disturbing thoughts about past events which resulted in trauma, that is, extraordinary mental or physical stress and/or injury. Examples may include sudden events, such as a natural disaster, or severe experience such as combat, imprisonment or abuse. It is not the nature of the event itself which is controlling on the question of its severity but rather the reaction to it which qualifies it as traumatic.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD): Overwhelming and/or disabling concern about routine social situations and people encountered in everyday life when the concern is unsupported or not well supported by actual fact. Excessive worry about being judged by others, inappropriate appearance, or the possibility of embarrassing behavior are examples. The disorder is also known as “social phobia.”

Specific phobias: An intense and inappropriate fear of a specific object or situation in which results in extraordinary measures to avoid or control exposure to the object or situation. Included among the top phobias are fear of spiders, snakes, blood, flying, confined spaces, heights, vomit, cancer, thunderstorms, and death.

**Any one, any combination, or all of the above may be and are present in normal life and experience to some degree at one time or another. They become disorders when they are so prominent in our thoughts and behavior that they interfere with our daily living.  It is best to visit with your doctor or counselor to determine any diagnosis.**

What causes anxiety?

Anxiety usually develops from experiences in your recent or distant past, feelings of guilt, shame, or unfulfilled desires that are stored in your subconscious.  They build on each other like a snowball until your body has a physical reaction called a panic or anxiety attack.  These physical reactions can include increased heart rate, high blood pressure, shaking hands, crying, stomach cramps, profuse sweating, and the strong desire to run away and hide.

How many people have anxiety?

While you may feel alone, you are far from it.  According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety is the number one mental health issue in the United States, even surpassing depression.  The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry reports that anxiety affects about 40 million people and it costs United States workplaces 46.6 billion dollars every year.  Eighty-eight percent of that figure is from lost productivity.  You are not alone.  By the time most of us reach adulthood, we have built up many negative ways of thinking, feeling and acting which can persist throughout our lives.

What kind of anxiety can be helped with hypnosis?

Anxiety issues include panic disorder, general anxiety disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia and other specific phobias, like fear of public speaking or flying and related issues like vaginismus and fear of intimacy can be overcome with hypnosis.  If you are unsure your issue falls within this category, Heal with Hypnosis is willing to help clients with any issues.  During your first session we will discuss your issues and prioritize to give you fast and lasting relief.

How can hypnosis help my anxiety or phobia?

Hypnosis distracts your conscious mind with relaxation so that you can discuss and come to an agreement with your subconscious mind, the center of all your feelings, habits, and memories, about how you can productively handle situations that would usually cause a panic attack.  This allows deeper thoughts and feelings to come to the surface, helping you locate and essentially become bored with memories of past experiences to make the positive and permanent changes you desire.  By desensitizing old memories and habits—things you may not know are there, but that get in your way, that have emotionally blocked you for years–and inserting positive responses and actions you can achieve permanent change. The conscious mind knows that there is no logical reason to be afraid of spiders, for example, but the subconscious mind has attached a fear to the spider, and the subconscious fear overrides it.

Find your freedom and peace of mind again. You deserve it.

Call Rebecca to schedule your consultation at 605-940-8389 or click here.