About anxiety

Anxiety is a fear that people could do without, yet 90% of the populations suffer from some degree of anxiety. Most people think they cannot do anything about it. However, releasing yourself from anxiety can literally set you free to soar and achieve all those things you have been dreaming of.

What does anxiety really feel like? 

The many guises of anxiety

Pure anxiety feels like an internal conflict that is out of your control. A desire to do or be one thing yet an inexplicable and deeper block that ensures that you do or be the opposite.Anxiety can also manifest in symptoms, so for instance you might develop some phobias (which are unreasonable fears) or even some rituals or obsessions that you have to do to keep the anxiety at bay. Although you know that if you hang out the washing with the wrong colour pegs nothing bad will really happen, the fear is so strong that you are compelled to change them. If you do not you don't believe, but fear that something bad will happen and it will be your fault.
Even if you know exactly why you developed a phobia, it is still an outlet for your anxiety. For example if you were one of a number of people stuck in a lift, you might develop a fear of lifts or enclosed spaces. Yet not everybody in that lift will have developed that phobia.
You latch on to symptoms because you are subconsiously trying to find a reason for your fear.  You don't always develop symptoms as obvious as that.

Some of the following may sound familiar:

• We make sure we are liked
• or we are pleasing people
• or are noticed
• or don't need anyone
• or are needed by someone
• or feel trapped
• or feel irritated by the slightest thing
• or feel life expects too much
• or feel you're at the bottom of the pile
• the list goes on.

Until we are able to let go of that funadamental behaviour and belief, we will be anxious, because we know, as adults we cannot possible acheive 100% success in conquering these irrational fears and so we feel vulnerable and out of control.

Fear and Anxiety 

What is the difference between real fear and anxiety

The difference between fear and anxiety is that anxiety is an emotional fear without any logical foundation. You might be able to talk you way out of a physical ... fear, bailiffs, thugs, owing money, being found out ... and even if you can't the cause of the fear will either materialise or pass you by untouched. with an emotional fear, the cause is unknown and so talking you way out of it takes a lot more than facing up and thinking strategies.
It is sad that many people who are suffering from anxiety think it is 'how they are' and their cross to bear. In fact most people can be helped and their anxiety overcome. They just have to be brave enough to take the plunge and break free.
I mentioned earlier that anxiety suffers are like prisoners in cages of their own making. You can go so far and then your entrapment stops further progress. Well you've heard of recidifist prisoners becoming institutionalised. Suffers with anxiety are trapped by their own behaviour patterns and limiting beliefs. They need help at the very deepest emotional level within. to eradicate years of imprisonment and living behind bars of their own self-protection.

Feeling Anxious? 

Anxiety - Do we need it?

No we don't need anxiety - but then again you could say maybe we do. You could say that prisons have many people who are not anxious enough to fit in with societies expectations and therefore know no boundaries when it comes to crime.
As with most things anxiety is useful in small doses- get too much of it and it has a negative effect.
Let me explain. Imagine if you did not have enough anxiety to keep your job, you would have no commitment, would ignore deadlines and eventually lose your job. If you were not anxious to fit in and please then you would be very unpopular, probably have few friends, ending in isolation and unhappiness.
We are brought up to have a certain amount of 'healthy' anxiety 'Look both ways before you cross', don't take sweet off strangers etc. Sometimes with a peppering of negative anxiety 'People won't like you if you do that'. etc.
Anxiety is great until it becomes a problem then like the overbearing parent too much anxiety becomes the Prison Warden.

Help with Anxiety 

My approach to helping suffers of anxiety

The approach I use most in dealing with anxiety is hypnoanalysis. this is a type of hypnotherapy that, rather than using suggestion in the traditional way, gets to the emotional root of the problem. you may have a perfect itellectual understanding of why you feel the way you do and you may see the logiac when people tell you that you can't let what has happened to you in the past influence who you are today. i can't argue with that, it makes perfect sense. Yet that doesn't set you free emtionally. Fears of the emotions are ridiculous and childish. invariably the emotions have been set in childhood and grown with you. This means that although you are an adult your fear is childlike. Consequently the intensity of the fear seems to indicate something much more profound for the adult. Therefore on a conscious, intellectual level the source of youranxiety could never be accepted or understood.
When we are very young we re very receptive to learning about things that we need to know. that includes how to walk, feed ourselves, protect oursleves, to get what we want and avoid what we don't, to twist people around our little finger and to avoid that angry look.
One of the biggest things we need to do is to make sure we are safe and we do this by forming a fundamental behaviour pattern that wil last well into adulthood.

Break FREE

Mind & Body Therapies Ltd. Registered address: 52 Bolton Street, Bury BL9 0LL Tel: 0161 764 1440