Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy for Anxiety & Panic Attacks

Anxiety is a normal response to feeling threatened or overwhelmed. People differ in the way stress affects them - their response  may be made up of the memory of past experiences, beliefs and attitudes about situations, and what else is going on for them at a particular time. Anxiety disorders and panic attacks are common reasons for people to undergo hypnotherapy, with wonderful results. 

Everyone experiences anxiety. It is an entirely normal physical/emotional response that our mind manufactures to let us know that something has to change. When a pattern of responding to certain events is created, an anxious response may become habitual even when it is no longer appropriate to the situation. It is at this point that anxiety can become a problem. In fact, you may not even remember when you began to feel anxious, or what the original trigger was. 

Most of us experience different stresses in our lives to varying degrees, leading us to experience different levels of anxiety. A panic attack is a severe experience of anxiety. Someone who has an anxiety disorder may respond to any level of stress in an overblown way - with a panic attack.  This is not because they are being 'dramatic' or 'high-strung', but because their mind has created a link between a normal occurrence (stress) and a way of responding to that stress (anxiety and panic). It can seem like there is no way to control these feelings. In severe cases, a person having a panic attack may feel that they are going to die.  Sometimes simply the thought of having a panic attack can bring on an attack.

A common experience is a feeling of being "stuck" with this problem. A person naturally tries to escape these attacks by thinking in a certain way - trying to think rationally, or to tell yourself certain things, only to find that this doesn't make any real difference. The problem is not originating in the conscious mind, and therefore the conscious mind is quite limited in its capacity to change the anxiety. The feeling of being stuck is often made worse after trying anti-depressants prescribed by a doctor. Occasionally the may be helpful for this type of problem, but usually they are not - anxiety and depression are not the same thing, and should not be treated as such. 

Freedom from these awful experiences comes from using the part of the mind that does have the capacity to change the way we feel, and the capacity to influence the way our nervous system is working. Hypnosis is a tool that enables us to directly access this part of our mind. Using hypnosis techniques, we can make changes to the way that we respond to our "triggers", often relatively quickly. Of course, we cannot take away the stresses in your life, but hypnotherapy can help you to create a new and more appropriate response to stress. If it is appropriate, we can teach you self-hypnosis techniques which you can use to further enhance your security and freedom.