The irony of anxiety

I’ve been thinking about anxiety lately, and how ironic it is. I feel like anxiety can be very ironic, in many ways:

  • How it evolved to protect us, but can make us want to harm ourselves

  • How you need to relax to overcome it, but that’s impossible to do in the moment

  • How the harder you try to get rid of it, the more anxious it can make you feel

  • If you expect a situation to cause anxiety, we can become anxious about the expected anxiety

  • How anxiety can stop people reaching out for help with their anxiety

It’s also kind of ironic how the part of our brain that produces that anxiety, also produces excitement.

In many ways it might seem excitement is the opposite of anxiety. Excitement makes you want to go out and try something new. It makes you look forward to something, brings joy, curiosity and overcomes fear. The physical symptoms of excitement are:

  • Increased heart-rate

  • Increased temperature/sweating

  • Stomach churning/butterflies/IBS

  • Mind/thoughts racing

Sound familiar? They are the same symptoms as anxiety. Your nervous system is preparing itself.

Anxiety comes from our amygdala. You might have heard of it as your ‘fight or flight’ response. It’s an almond shaped structure in our brain and it’s job is to protect you. Sometimes it gets carried away and can over-react, seeing threats where there aren’t any.

This area of the brain isn’t intellectual, so it can’t come up with new ideas. So next time a situation arises, it will refer to what it did before. Imagine last time a certain situation came up, you were anxious and cancelled your plans. You survived. Your brain has now learnt that this is a good response to have because it keeps you safe, and will want to do the same thing (cancelling your plans) again next time.

Silly brain. It’s trying it’s best to keep us safe, but it’s over-reacting to threats that aren’t real. For example, giving a speech, using public transport, or even singing karaoke. None of those things are real life-threatening events, but sometimes our brain can react as if they are. This can get worse and worse until it’s hard to even leave the house.

The more we give into the anxiety and do what it wants us to do, e.g. stay in bed, the more evidence we have provided for our brain that it was right. Ironic.

The good news is, we can re-wire our brains. We can unlearn and relearn. We can teach it to react how we want. It’s not always easy and sometimes we need some support. That’s the whole point of therapy.

Hypnotherapy for anxiety is very effective, and delivers faster results than other therapies. You get to decide what is outside your comfort zone or what is an achievable goal. By taking baby steps over a series of weeks, you can travel further than you ever thought.

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