Anxiety Attacks and Hypnosis

8 Effective Ways To Deal With Anxiety Understand Fear Stop Prescription Drugs Distract Yourself Stop The Anxiety Talk Stop Thinking About Anxiety Support Network Correct Breathing Hypnosis 5 Types of Anxiety Disorder Panic Disorder Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) Social Anxiety Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Fear is essential to human survival. Anxiety attacks and other forms of anxiety are behaviors that have developed from inappropriate fear of particular situations.  These reactions then become generalized and can be triggered at the wrong times. Fear memories are learned faster and retained longer than other types of emotional memory. This is important. Learning to respond rapidly to danger makes sure that you do the right thing in event that the same thing happens again. It is an automatic behavior that is learnt very quickly and is essential to basic survival.  It is this rapid learning that leaves us vulnerable to the development of anxiety  Research has shown that genes can be a factor in anxiety. Some people have a genetic predisposition which is then often triggered by some stressful life event. This event appears to change how the brain deals with fear. An enormous number of people are affected every year by anxiety. Anxiety Disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States. 19 million (13%) of the adult U.S. population (ages 18-54) are affected.

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Anxiety Program

Step 1 Understand Fear

The feelings of fear that you experience are caused by the release of adrenaline in your body when your brain mistakenly responds to a situation that is not real.

Adrenaline is there to help you either face danger or run from it. It cannot make you pass out and it will not kill you. You must reassure yourself of this fact. Nobody has died from the normal levels of adrenaline that your body produces. In normal circumstances, it is there to help you.

Understand the effects of adrenaline. Look through the symptoms for panic attacks given above and you will see the list of symptoms caused by adrenaline.

The next time you experience an anxiety attack try to observe it and experience it as if you were a scientist doing research and note everything that happens to you in the order that it happens. Perhaps you can write it down as it happens. It is not pleasant but persevere; observe it and understand it.

The idea is to time the anxiety attack and to measure it's severity.

It will probably last about 10 minutes so keep a track of the time, minute by minute. Give the symptoms you are experiencing a intensity on scale of 1 (very relaxed) to 10 (full panic)

This has a number of effects

Step 2 Drugs

If you are already taking medication then see your medical practitioner and agree a plan to reduce them in stages and eventually come off them entirely. Don't worry about this. Take your time, but have a definite plan and stick to it.

Step 3 Distract Yourself

You can also distract yourself with something that is going on around you. For example if you are on a crowded subway train then look at the other people in the carriage and say to yourself something like 'Well, everyone around me seems to be quite calm and unconcerned. I will rely on their judgement that here is no danger.' If you can identify someone around you that you might consider emotionally and physically less capable, like a young child, then this can reinforce this line of thought. Invoking protective instincts in this way is especially useful.

Step 4 Stop the Anxiety Talk

Step 5 Stop Thinking About Anxiety

If you've had it for a while, you probably know more about it than most health professionals. Get rid of all those books, newspaper articles, and research notes that you have gathered and read over and over again. If you still have anxiety attacks then all of that advice and those proposed methods have failed.

Stop thinking about past events. You don't need to go over them again. There are no clues to be had there.

Stop thinking about the possibility of future anxiety attacks. Don't anticipate them, lead a normal life. Don't behave differently because you think that behaviour may provoke an anxiety attack. You have to face up to those fears. Break the cycle of expectation, it is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Step 6 Support Network

Step 7 Correct Breathing

Breathe in steadily through your nose for a count of 5. Pull the air in by pushing out your stomach. This pulls the diaphragm down to inflate your lungs. Imagine the air is energy and that it is flowing into your head and filling it with positive energy.

Hold your breath for a count of 5.

Slowly breathe out through your mouth for a count of 10 by pushing in your stomach muscles. Imagine that you are breathing out old, stale energy-depleted air.

This is a natural way of breathing. Babies breathe this way all the time.

Keep it steady and even.

Step 8 Hypnosis

You will learn to let your normal unconscious processes take back control of your anxiety response. Initially you will learn to consciously relax, then gradually your unconscious will begin to react calmly again in non threatening situations.

There are two sessions. The first session is deep therapy to help adjust your unconscious processes and restore them to normal levels. The second session trains you in relaxation and natural breathing techniques.

The Anxiety recording uses binaural tone technology to deepen the trance experience so that the hypnotic suggestions are easily accepted. If you would like to understand more about this technology then please see the pages on Brainwaves.

The Charles Linden Method

The Linden Method as it has come to be known is not hypnotherapy but has been used very successfully by many thousands of people.

If you would like to know more then visit his site.
If you would like any further information on anxiety attacks then please see the Anxiety Links page.

Working on other types of anxiety disorder

Anxiety and fear are controlled in the brain by a pair of small organs at its base known as the amygdala. In anxiety disorder this fails to respond correctly; a little like a valve that is stuck open.

The differences in fear processing may be due to the existence of two main pathways into the amygdala. A higher one through the cortex which allows for conscious reasoning and a lower one directly from the sensory relay stations of the thalamus.

Associations made through the unconscious pathway are more vivid and harder to forget. It is at these deep unconscious levels that hypnosis can work to reprogram how the brain responds.

If you want to read more on the research then please see the anxiety disorder research at the National Institute of Mental Health.