If you’re wondering whether hypnotherapy for anxiety actually works, you’re not alone, and it’s a fair question to ask before trying anything new. Anxiety has a way of shrinking your life.
It keeps you on edge and wears you down. Slowly it starts to affect your sleep and your health, and your sense of self.
Plenty of people live with it for years, assuming that’s just how their brain works.
It isn’t. A lot of anxiety is a learned pattern and patterns can be changed. Hypnotherapy is one of the approaches that can help, and for many people it makes a real difference.
Before I get into details about how this process works, it’s important to understand what anxiety is and when is a good time to start to seriously consider getting help for it.
What anxiety actually is
Anxiety is your body’s response to long, intense stress.
It shows up as feeling tense, worried, restless, on edge or afraid.
If you’re forever turning over everyday situations or running worst case scenarios in your head, it can build quietly until it starts to feel normal.
It’s often set off by something specific, a traumatic event, an illness, a big life change like a divorce. But not always.
Left unchecked it can bring on panic attacks that seem to arrive from nowhere and knock the wind out of you.
Anxiety and low mood also tend to travel together and share a lot of the same ground.
The different forms it takes
Anxiety shows up in a few different forms. Generalised anxiety is when you feel worried and on edge about everyday things without an obvious reason.
Panic disorder means you get sudden, repeated panic attacks. Social anxiety is when social situations bring on real, persistent fear.
With generalised anxiety you might notice fatigue, restlessness, muscle tension, irritability and broken sleep and struggle to recall the last time you genuinely felt relaxed.
Panic attacks tend to be physical and scary. A pounding heart, shortness of breath, sweating, nausea, shaking.
Social anxiety can bring on similar physical symptoms whenever you’re around people and worried about being judged.
When it’s become a problem
It’s worth paying attention when anxiety starts to control your life, or negatively impact it on a regular basis.
That might be when the worries feel oversized and impossible to switch off, when you’re avoiding things to keep it at bay, when panic attacks become regular or when it’s getting in the way of work, friendships and home life.
If that sounds familiar, this is exactly the kind of pattern hypnotherapy can help loosen.
How hypnotherapy helps with anxiety
Because so much of anxiety is learned, it can also be unlearned. A lot of it runs on association.
A feeling or situation gets paired with the anxious response until the two fire together automatically. Hypnotherapy works on those associations and on the thinking underneath them.
In a session you settle into a calm, focused state where your mind is more open to new suggestions. With some guidance you can get underneath the worry, look at what’s feeding it and start building steadier, calmer thought patterns in its place.
A good chunk of the work happens in that first consultation, where we map out what’s actually going on and what’s driving it.
To be clear, this sits alongside your GP or psychologist rather than replacing them, especially if your anxiety is severe or you’re managing depression. For a lot of people it’s a genuinely useful part of the picture.
How many sessions will you need?
It varies. For anxiety, stress or panic attacks, many people need somewhere around four to six sessions.
If there’s more going on or low mood alongside it, it can be six to eight or more, depending on you and what you’re working through.
What you can get out of it
Our overall goal is to help you feel like yourself again.
Over a course of sessions, hypnotherapy can help you see stressful situations differently, take the heat out of the anxious response, quiet the inner critic and rebuild some confidence and calm.
Want some help with anxiety?
At Awaken Hypnotherapy in Perth, I offer one on one hypnotherapy for stress, anxiety and panic attacks, built around you and aimed at the triggers and patterns underneath them, not just the surface feelings.
If you’re ready for some peace of mind, book a free consultation and we’ll talk about where to start.