Anxiety 2 Calm

A lot of people with anxiety have motivation problems. Anxiety is part of the human bodies Fight or Flight response. It might be useful to see the fight or flight response in terms of motivation. This very basic, fundamental part of us which is so active when we feel anxious makes us do one of two things: run away or stand and fight. It is quite common for people who suffer from anxiety and panic attacks to have problems with motivation. It is not in fact that they lack motivation it is that they are very highly motivated to stay away from things which might be dangerous and stressful. People with anxiety have great motivation and strength of mind, but it is sadly pointing in the wrong direction.

So what can you do to overcome this and start to empower yourself and move forwards? They key lies in planning. It is not a good idea to choose where you want to be and go for it, you actually need to do much more planning. This is especially true when getting to where you want looks so daunting and anxiety provoking.

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When you plan in detail you do two things at the same time:

1. You break down large goals into easy to achieve targets.

2. You pre-empt, solve and mitigate against any problems that might arise.

The end result is a far easier and less anxiety-provoking experience.

Planning is easy. You can look at it in either of two ways. You could take a specific problem and then, with pen and paper, go into specific detail about what needs to be done and how that can be achieved. You could create it on paper as a process, or a series of steps, smaller events.

The other way to go about it, which might be better suited to someone that has suffered from anxiety in the past, is to put down on paper exactly what a life worth living looks like. Create a description of how you want your life to be in each individual area: work, travel, love, social life, spiritual life etc. Then set about breaking down those things into various achievable steps.

In doing this you can make your life more positive, direct your energy and make real progress. It is almost guaranteed that as your life moves towards where you want it to be your anxiety will diminish.

Most of us realise how irrational our thinking is when we are anxious or stressed. Most of us that have suffered from any kind of anxiety or panic have had those vivid, stubborn, intrusive negative thoughts going through our head. In the cold light of day of course we know they are not true – if we had stayed in that supermarket check-out queue we would neither have had a heart attack nor died, and you’ve felt like you were fainting many times but have in fact never fainted.

So, our automatic negative thoughts are complete rubbish. CBT to the rescue, we can simply identify them and replace them with something more positive and realistic. Except we can’t. When we are in a heightened state of anxiety, identifying and replacing thoughts by recognising how irrational and untrue they are is almost impossible. CBT gets round this by suggesting thoughts are written down first, and then dealt with. This is a much better approach as the process of writing things down slows us down. Problem is, it’s not always practical or possible to examine our thoughts on paper while we are in a situation which is causing anxiety. That means we have to write the thoughts either before or after they occur and apply our rationality in the situation. This is hard and there is a good physiological reason why.

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When we are anxious, various parts of our bodies shut down as blood and therefore energy is diverted to the fight or flight response. It is for this reason that our digestion can be troublesome leading to feelings of nausea or diarrhoea – our digestive system is not needed for immediate fight or flight so in times of anxiety it can be temporarily shut off. Along the same lines, when we are anxious or stressed or panicking the link from our developed rational rain is lost. That thoughtful part of us, that knows that the potential danger isn’t really anything to worry about is too labour intensive and not useful when we are in real danger, therefore we have evolved to break that connection during stressful times.

This is bad news for anxiety sufferers. Unless we can re-establish that rational part of our brain during stressful times it is hard to break the cycle of anxiety. So what then can we do? The answer is simple…relax.

When we relax all of the parts of our bodies that are shut down for fight or flight can come back to life. That physical relaxation allows all our mental work (identifying and rationalising negative thoughts) to succeed.

So practice formal relaxation everyday to get into the practice of being able to lower your stress levels in each and every situation.

Hypnoanalysis, analytical hypnotherapy, pure hypnosis – call it what you will. For those of you who are regular readers of this blog and have an interest in anxiety disorders this treatment is probably known to you. Just to recap I have recently had the chance to view hypnoanalysis from the eyes of a long term sufferer of anxiety and phobias. It has been an education into the dark arts of scamming money from people with anxiety and panic attacks.

The therapy promised a lot, and when I say a lot I mean it promised the world. The web-sites and brochures of those therapists involved speak of "cures", "solutions" and a complete cessation of symptoms – fast! They have testimonials where people, with blandly implausible sounding names, wax lyrical about how their anxiety, depression, phobias and OCD evaporated. Sounds great. Problem is, it doesn’t work and is basically a money making exercise which takes advantage of human misery and desperation.

More Info on Overcoming Anxiety – click here.

I knew that hypnoanalysis was unproven. I quick Google search showed that the only study that mentioned it by name had found no benefits over equivalent psychotherapy. I was also worried that, for such a miracle cure, no one that wasn’t making money from it had talked about their experiences – either positive or negative – on forums and chat rooms. If it was that amazing, I am sure, with hindsight, that they would have. I later realised why there were few, if any, negative experiences reported about it.

Hypnoanalysis has two main underpinning ideas.

1. All anxiety symptoms can be traced back to one event that caused guilt and shame, and that event has often been pushed out of conscious memory.

2. If you uncover that event and release the trapped emotion you will be able to let go of your anxiety (or other mental or physical health problem).

Both of those principles are wrong.

Beat anxiety – click here

Anxiety can have a number of causes, and while it can be post traumatic (ie stemming from one negative experience) it is often just the product of the way you interpreted events either when you were younger or, in some cases, later in life. In either case, dealing with trauma from childhood carries no promise of success. Quite the contrary, you may well have processed those memories fully years ago, and now be suffering from bad habits and faulty thinking. Messing around with childhood memories (real or imagined) probably doesn’t do a great deal for you.

That said, Hypnoanalysis has probably worked for a few people to some extent. Some people may release some emotion in a mildly relaxed hypnotic state and feel better for it, for others there is the ever mighty placebo effect. These people are a small minority.

So, hypnoanalysis doesn’t work. That’s nothing new, there are many therapies that are not all they are cracked up to be. So why this big post dedicated to hypnoanalysis and it’s scamming? Well, I don’t like it for several reasons.

I have met two hypnoanalysts and they were both horrible. "Wait", I hear you cry, "you can’t tell us that all hypnoanalysts are bad based on a sample of just two!" Well, I can and I will, and that is a much more scientific survey than the hypnoanalysts themselves have ever done on the efficacy of their therapy. People with anxiety disorders are by their very nature nervous and insecure, they like to be made to feel comfortable. Hypnoanalysts are cold, overbearing, brash, arrogant, impatient and dismissive. Their sessions are often shorter than they advertise and they bundle you out at the end as quickly as possible. They say it is because of "transference" issues that they want to know only the bare minimum about you. This is rubbish.

My second problem is the price. Often these people are charging £70-90 for 45 minutes. It is not a highly trained profession – in fact listening to someone reel-off childhood memories is much easier than being a bog standard "suggestion" hypnotherapist, who would normally charge around half of that. One hypnoanalyst I met joked about having a client as a "cash cow". Would you want to tell your deepest and darkest secrets to this man?

The third thing I came to hate was the "Get Out Clause". Scam therapists always have an awkward moment when they have to get rid of the patient without having provided the promised cure. Often the patient will just cut their losses and stop going to sessions, others, more desperate perhaps, will persevere. It was interesting to see, in my case study, how the therapists language changed. In the initial email contact before therapy began it was stated that  "…(after treatment) you will probably feel better than you have ever felt before". In the initial session it was stated that cure would be like bursting a bubble – a dramatic release. It was also said that releasing emotion was an essential aspect of this therapy. This was maintained until the end when it changed: actually change can come slowly and gradually, and that it in fact isn’t necessary to release emotion. Eventually the final get out clause was…"you are resistant. It’s not your fault. Go away for six months, get drunk, have sex and live your life. Then start again, from session one with a new therapist. Not with me as a therapist – there are transference issues that mean hypnoanalysis will never work for you with me". So, that was that – the promised cure hadn’t come and despite being told again and again that he was a perfect subject for free-association and hypnoanalysis he was now told that they could no longer help him. Money back guarantee with this ultra-successful therapy? No chance.

More Info on Overcoming Anxiety – click here

Last of all comes the Danger part.

Two different hypnoanalysts fabricated false memories of serious abuse. This is dangerous because, if the client believes them, they could very well accuse loved ones of being criminals. There are many documented cases of this "False Memory Syndrome" and now I know where many of them came from.

Let me show you how this is done with this simple exercise.

1. Close your eyes and imagine there is a small blue elephant in the corner of the room.

2. He’s got something on his head, what is it? What colour is it?

3. Now open your eyes and understand hypnoanalytical logic: because you could imagine the elephant clearly it must have happened. It’s that simple. Now imagine you were being abused…can you make it seem real? Even though you know it never happened?.

I know the memories of abuse uncovered in this case were false and irrelevant (the mind will imagine the most unsavoury of things). In fact two hypnoanalysts used the same technique to bring up two quite separate false memories which they both claimed were root cause of my anxiety and low self-esteem. By their own admittance there can’t be two separate and different root causes. Of course again they were speaking rubbish.

Lots of people are conned in hypnoanalysis but few people complain, ask for a refund, or write about it online. Why? I’ll tell you why…anxiety sufferers are generally nervous and socially aware and don’t like looking bad. This type of therapy is cruel and degrading and tends to leave the subject feeling dejected and invaded. Few people want to speak out about such an unpleasant experience that has cost so much for such little reward.

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