Could Hypnosis Help Your Anxiety?
Hypnosis has been around for centuries and is often used as part of psychotherapy, but as it's considered alternative medicine people are often skeptical about its benefits.
Many people are wary of trying hypnosis as a part of their treatment, largely due to the many myths surrounding it.
What Hypnosis Is and Isn't
Hypnosis is a state of guided relaxation and complete concentration and focus. It begins as you are guided by the therapist’s voice. The idea is that you will reach comfortable and completely relaxed state.
People who are under hypnosis are completely aware of what is going on — they are aware of themselves, the therapist and their surroundings. People under hypnosis are not asleep and have full memories of what happens during a session. You won't be made to do anything you don’t want to do.
Hypnosis allows you to block out the disturbing things around you and focus on important feelings and thoughts that you want to work on. This relaxed, safe and comfortable state is extremely useful for focusing on your problems and feelings and working together for resolving them.
How Can Hypnosis Help Anxiety?
Anxiety and anxiety disorders are extreme and irrational fears — in many cases fears of completely normal daily activities, places and situations. Often as anxiety evolves it is accompanied by panic attacks and agoraphobia.
The brain is responsible for all our thoughts — good and bad — and sometimes it can trick us into thinking that normal situations or things will put us in danger. For example, your brain may signal that you are in danger when you travel on a bus, causing a panic attack.
People begin to avoid places that they believe might trigger their panic attacks, and this can dramatically worsen their lifestyle.
The key factor here is how we think about these places and situations — we need to change the way we think about them, turning these negative thoughts into positive thoughts.
Unfortunately this is not always an easy thing to do by ourselves, but a therapist and hypnosis can help.
Using hypnosis, a therapist can help us change the way we think about and perceive these situations. Hypnosis as a part of the therapy can be help you to exclude all your disturbing surroundings and focus on your thoughts and feelings.
This helps the therapist to guide us towards perceiving normal daily activities as they are and not as though they are a threat.
If you're interested in trying hypnotherapy, a Google search for hypnotherapists in your area is a great place to start.