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How anxious brains work

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How anxious brains work is an important part of the understanding of anxiety and panic. So let’s begin to understand it.

Let’s start with the anxiety response. If we can understand what’s going on, we have a useful starting point. This is another in the series of learning how anxiety works.

Triggers begin the process; we’ve all had those feelings of being in a dangerous place, even when physically we aren’t. Clients often describe this as a feeling of ‘dread’. So what happens when anxiety is triggered in this way?

The parts of your brain responsible for anxiety are the amygdala and the thalamus, the limbic system. The aim of the thalamus is to keep us safe. The thalamus scans for potential dangers around us all the time, monitoring all our senses, a little like anxiety radar.

If it detects a potential threat, rightly or wrongly, even if something that isn’t a threat is recognised as a threat, it sends a message to the amygdala.

The amygdala then does all those things that we recognise as unwelcome and unpleasant. It may raise heart rate, cause sweating, shallow breathing, and tense our muscles. We are from that point hyper-vigilant.

This is the ‘fight or flight’ response that I am sure you are familiar with; it’s a natural and useful response to dangers around us.

The problem here is that in anxious people, this process can begin at any time, sometimes even for no apparent reason. It can happen on an otherwise good day – it makes us anxious, panic and want to escape.

This trigger can be tied to danger or it could be a trigger from the past, wrongly recognised in the present, it could come from a sight, sound, smell, touch or any of our senses.

Once the thalamus has signaled the amygdala, the amygdala takes over and shuts down our rational thinking. We are left with instinctive simple reactions such as fight or flight; we are out of reason and into instinct.

Importantly, we are responding to the stimulus without choice, the amygdala is preparing the body to deal with the threat.

What is needed to combat this response are methods that reassure the amygdala so that we can regulate the body, regulate the breathing and by doing that, tell the brain that everything is alright.

By doing that we turn back on the rational part of our brain and we no longer have an anxious brain.

Stay tuned for more resources on understanding and treating the anxious brain.

 

Hypno gastric band – the truth

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The hypno gastric band truth

 

If you want a hypno gastric band in Bolton, then please read this

 

The ethical problem with the hypno gastric band is simple. The therapist is lying to the client. You are not getting a gastric-band, you are getting an illusory shortcut,  you are buying a lie.

 

Where else would you pay for a professional to tell you a lie?

 

Would your Doctor be able to lie to you? Of course not, they are governed by an ethical code to cause you no harm, as a registered hypnotherapist and registered psychotherapist so am I, so why put your mind in the hands of a liar and pay for the privilege?

 

Unfortunately in the UK anyone can take a course (or not) and advertise themselves as a ‘hypnotherapist’ and make a living from telling weight-control lies to clients, the hypno gastric band method.

 

I believe that you deserve more honesty and value for money.

 

What you deserve is a lasting weight loss system that is based in expert knowledge and skills, UKCP and CNHC accredited.  After all, how you got into difficulty with weight control is unique to you, and so is the solution.

 

As a registered healthy weight coach as well as a registered hypnotherapy and psychotherapy provider. I am able to offer you a safe and supportive environment and method to make an honest and lasting difference.

 

All a hypno gastric band is designed to do is to make you think you are full sooner, why not just have professional therapy? Why not have access not to some one-size-fits-all solution, but to therapy designed around your needs and tailored personally to them?

 

The benefits are many, not only will you be taking control of this issue, but you will be empowering yourself to take control of other aspects of your life. 

I know you can do it, and you do too, even if you don’t know that you know it yet.

 

As you can probably tell, I feel strongly about this issue and I make no apologies for that. The hypno gastric band is an insult to your integrity as a client and to mine as a therapist.

So don’t buy a lie, but instead make an investment in yourself and your future.

 

Learn about anxiety

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No learn about anxiety resources would be complete without looking at emotional resilience. The word comes from ‘resili’ – the Latin word for ‘spring back’ – it’s the process of adapting in the face of adversity.

Think of anxiety a bit like a see-saw with ‘perceived’ ability to cope on one end and demands on the other. When demands are lower that ability to cope, we are OK, when the demands are bigger than our perceived ability to cope, we have a problem, we can learn to be less anxious.

Ego strengthening and emotional resilience are about improving ability to cope. We all use scales of 1 to 10, if our ability is say a grade 4 and a grade 6 problem comes up, we can struggle, if the ability is a 9, then the grade 6 problem is easily handled.

This resilience can be cultivated. The more we learn about anxiety, the more tools we have to cope.

The first step is Realism, being realistic about a situation, for example one of the difficulties with depression is that people often attach inappropriate meaning to events. If a depressed person telephones a friend and they don’t ring back, they might think ’my friend doesn’t like me’ when the actual reason may be that they didn’t even get the message.

Next we look at establishing a goal that we can work towards, a favourable outcome. Now here hypnosis can really help with what we call ‘future pacing’. We all know that hypnosis can help us look back at past problems by regressing. The other side of that coin is looking forward which is equally (if not more) powerful.

Self-discipline is important, abandoning those ‘crutch activities’ that feel safe and familiar. It might be drink or drugs or avoidance. Ego strengthening techniques can really help with this process.

Cultivating wider interests helps because it gives us different versions of ourselves. Think of all the energy an anxious person uses just being anxious, once they are less anxious they have a surplus or energy and time to spend, space to ‘grow into’.

Re-framing is seeing something through a different frame and really important if you want to learn about anxiety. Say you suffer an ankle injury; you may well be focusing on how it stops you doing what you want to do. If you’re a soldier on the front line of a war zone, a simple ankle injury might mean rest and relaxation away from stress and danger.

Here’s a great re-frame that goes directly to the next in our list – Identity. It’s easy to concentrate on all our difficulties and things that have gone wrong. Look though at the old saying ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. That’s re-framing from victim to survivor, think of all the strengths you’ve built up in those hard times!

Flexibility is also key, changing change, making change into opportunity rather than threat.  Flexibility is vital for surviving life’s storms, if you bend with the storm winds, you don’t break.

Hypnosis, mindfulness and meditation can all help to moderate outbursts and reinforce neural pathways. Think of your mind like a cornfield for this one. The old outdated negative patterns of thought are like well-trodden paths in the corn, easy to tread again and again. By treading down new paths of positive neural pathways in the corn, like the old ones, they get flatter and flatter, and easier to tread.

A strong social network is good for emotional resilience; reach out in times of difficulty. Today, we live more and more isolated lives, often secure in the belief that Facebook friends mean we’re well supported. Look for support in times of difficulty; seek out therapy if you need to.

For control, look to Victor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Moving your locus of control internally rather than externally can make a big difference.

Finally, test the changes, keep a journal and monitor your progress, learn about anxiety with free resources posted on this blog,  after all this isn’t work, it’s your life’s work!

 

Anxiety resources

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Anxiety resources are one of the keys to feeling better. So what’s the first to understand?

It has to be relaxation.

Think of your anxiety a little like a light switch, on is anxious and off is relaxed. It’s simple but profound.

It’s physically impossible to be relaxed and anxious at the same time.  Relaxation is the first practical tool I teach my clients to use in the fight against their anxiety. Why?

Because it puts the power back in the anxious clients’ hands, and an empowered client has made a first step towards recovery. That is one of the benefits of relaxation, we CAN all do it, sometimes we forget how, but it is an ability we all share.

A little like Carl Jung’s idea of the common subconscious, relaxation is a natural healing resource that we can all access to fight anxiety, with the right help.

I’m not talking about the bottle of wine and a film type of relaxation with Facebook pinging all the way through; I’m talking about deep relaxation of the autonomic nervous system. It’s kryptonite for anxiety.

And that is something most of us very rarely do.

And it’s the ultimate ‘me time’. If you don’t know that, do yourself a huge favour and try it out even if you aren’t struggling.

Hypnosis is a fantastic tool to kick start the relaxation process if it’s been long neglected, so is mindfulness or meditation. Whichever way it happens, once it happens, clients have a tool they can access anywhere to turn the intensity right down, like you would a radio.

Think of that from the anxious person’s perspective. They are often confused, frightened, lonely, and sometimes desperate but mostly they want tools. They want to help themselves.

In the toolbox, relaxation is the soft, soothing, comforting, velvety hammer of anxiety. You can use it and enjoy using it too. It’s not the medicine that made us screw our faces up as kids. It feels good and it helps, what’s not to love about relaxation?

You can feel it working too, slower heart rate, lower blood pressure, steady, easy breathing, benefit after benefit after benefit.

Every time you flick on or off a light switch, think of it… anxiety on, relaxed off.

 

Anxiety on.

Relaxed off.

Anxiety and you

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ANXIETY AND YOU

So why did I decide to specialise in anxiety?

Well, anxiety chose me, not the other way around. As a busy Lawyer, I didn’t see the warning signs on the road to anxiety until all of a sudden… BAM!

Huge panic attack on the first day of a holiday, fear, confusion, feeling isolated and vulnerable, I felt like I was the only person in the world that this was happening to. I had no tools to help me help myself.

Fast forward ten years and I moved from anxiety’s latest victim to hopefully its worst enemy. How did I do this?

I condensed expert personal therapy, countless hours of study, became a therapist, researched and researched into my desire to understand anxiety and how to help others. It led to UKCP accreditation, thousands of hours of dedicated work towards helping people like you, but most importantly it gave me a skill set that really makes a difference.

So what does that mean to you?

It means you’re not alone in this struggle; people have been there before, while your route into anxiety is personal to you, the symptoms of anxiety, generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety and that spiral of panic are very common to us all.

There are many useful ways to combat anxiety and find your peace, relaxation, CBT, hypnotherapy, reframing, behavioural methods and various forms of psychotherapy can all look at the causes and help move you forward.

You are not alone, I have been there and I have moved on.

You can move on with the right answers and methods. Therapy isn’t a magic wand, it’s sometimes hard work but the therapist collaborating with you as the client is the key to making that progress.

Whether anxiety strikes out of the blue or is a familiar part of your life when that feeling of dread, the fear of fear comes over you, you can use some of the resources posted on my last blog to help in the short term.

I find that with clients in my treatment room, learning about anxiety is a major part of the process and so I decided to put some of that knowledge out here to help you.

In the next blog, I will talk in more detail about therapy methods and how they work, but more importantly about how they can help you. Whether face to face or by online therapy, the more you understand, the more tools you have to combat anxiety.

I hope you’ll join me

Stuart

Help for Anxiety and Panic

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HELP FOR ANXIETY AND PANIC

THE TEN TOOLS YOU CAN USE RIGHT NOW

1 – Remember that although your feelings and symptoms are very frightening, they are not dangerous or harmful.

2 – Understand that what you are experiencing is just an exaggeration of your normal bodily reactions to stress.

3 – Do not fight your feelings or try to wish them away. The more you are willing to face those feelings, the less intense they will be.

4 – Do not add to your panic by thinking about what “may” happen. If you find yourself asking “what if?” Tell yourself “so what!”

5 – Stay in the present. Notice what is really happening to you as opposed what you think might happen.

6 – Label your level of fear from 0 to 10 and watch it go up and down. Notice that it does not stay at a very high level for more than a few seconds.

7 – When you find yourself thinking about fear, change your “what if?” thinking. Focus on and carry out a simple and manageable task such as counting backwards from 100 by sets of 3.

8 – Notice that when you stop adding frightening thoughts to you fear, it begins to fade.

9 – When the fear comes, expect and accept it. Wait and give it time to pass without running away from it.

10- Be proud of yourself your progress thus far, and think about how good you will feel when you succeed this time.

Therapy for jealousy

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Jealousy can feel like we are losing our hold

Therapy for jealousy and emotional issues. These can be helped by individual therapy in a safe and supportive setting

Jealousy, something (often secretly) familiar to many of us. Jealousy and Envy (yes, they are different things, envy occurs when we lack a desired attribute enjoyed by someone else and jealousy when something we already possess is threatened by a third person) can both be very intense feelings that in turn can easily dominate aspects of our lives. Another problem is that they can be as hard to shift as they are to deal with, and often are not talked about or discussed.

Jealousy can destroy love, and it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t been touched by the classic signs of jealousy such as lack of trust, fear of losing someone we love, or anger at attention paid to others. When it comes, that intensity of emotion can render rational thinking impossible and even cause behaviours in the sufferer that drive people away and reinforce the self-fulfilling prophecy.

The emotional content of jealousy is complex, abandonment, loss, fear, sorrow, humiliation, betrayal; the list is long and infamous. Even violence can make an unwelcome appearance where jealousy is concerned, and it can be as irrational as it is damaging, Steven Stosny, a psychologist says, “The formula for jealousy, is an insecure person times an insecure relationship” and goes on to point out that it isn’t just sexual jealousy at play, sometimes children or any kind of friendship that diverts attention from the sufferer can be a problem.

With origins based in our far-distant evolution, perhaps to protect intimate relationships, in our current lives where we may change partners several times in the course of a lifetime, jealousy can become a painful burden. The feeling of inadequacy makes it seem a particularly poignant and difficult burden.

So, what can be done? Well, like many things, communication is often at the root of the solution, jealousy is often something we deny in ourselves so just recognising and acknowledging it are also important steps. It’s often too personal and complex for a list of self-help suggestions as seem to be so common in our culture that demands quick fixes. Jealousy isn’t something we can cast off like an unwanted coat when spring comes, it’s a treatment process, and moving beyond jealousy is a skill that often takes a little time to learn.

Having said that, as is so often the case, people can travel through life with often debilitating levels of jealousy, accepting that as their fate. Surely, if you’re affected, it’s worth taking some steps now to hopefully improve the quality of life and relationships still to come…?

Change in therapy

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Clients often dwell in the past or live in the future, mindfulness can help with focus as one of many benefits

Clients often dwell in the past or live in the future, mindfulness can help with focus as one of many benefits

 

Change in therapy, one common denominator is clients often seeks a big change, rather than gradual shifts into change, we can make ourselves mountains to climb. We’re most of us familiar with the famous Chinese quote from Laozi “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” and this is how the guides tell us to effect change, bit by bit. In a world of instant gratification however, this is less appealing than the idea of announcing to the world (or ourselves) that we are suddenly different in a big way, a dramatic way.

For some of course, who are ready for change, it can be a resounding success, for others we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment when those old familiar patterns creep back in. Patterns are a big part of how we live, and of course are often a big part of how those around perceive us, and therefore predict our behaviour. Most people aren’t fond of change, but many want it.

The science of change, habits, addictions and patterns, is far too big and complex to even touch upon here, but that’s just a repetition of the ‘oh it’s no use, it can’t be done’ mantra that appeases the slip back on the seemingly endless path into ‘changed forever’. So I say this, consider the effects of that change, that potential small step.

When we change one thing that means other things change as a result.

You get off a plane after a few hours to a blue sea and sun, your mood changes. You serve up breakfast in bed, you get a great big smile, someone else’s mood changes, so your mood changes, and on it goes… One thing affects another and before you know it, your small change has taken you somewhere completely different. One of my old lecturers used to call it the M62 (an English highway) principle, a turn off begins by diverging only a tiny bit from the route and before you know it, you’re on a radically different path, and that’s it, evolution and not revolution.

So maybe don’t dismiss that small change as not enough, or if you’ve made a big resolution that has fallen by the wayside but leaves a fragment of its intent or meaning to germinate on fertile ground, then maybe make that your focus, tend it, nurture it and see where that beanstalk leads you.

‘Changes aren’t permanent, but change is’ (thanks to Neil Peart for that quote).

Mental Health Matters

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The key to subconscious healing lies in your own hands, my aim is to help you find it

Mental Health Matters. The key to subconscious healing lies in your own hands, my aim is to help you find it

Welcome to the first of my therapy blog posts, where I introduce myself and share a vision for the future of therapy, and how you use it.

I’m smiling widely today, and here’s why, Talking-Cure’s new website is live. Talking-Cure is my vision, and the result of a great deal of hard work. It’s different, and this is a different approach to therapy for the North West, have a look at the site and see why. Talking-cure is founded in quality training, and the level of Client service, I believe, is second to none. In this blog I’ll be dispelling myths, sharing information and bringing you my own take on mental health and finding solutions to your issues, because that’s what I do.

I have always believed that the world of psychology has a lot to share with people from all walks of life who, for one reason or another, may never see the inside of a treatment room. That there is a profession aimed at understanding and alleviating suffering of the mind is a constant source of inspiration to me but unfortunately, therapy can often be seen as a last resort, if a consideration at all. Having a positive impact on peoples’ lives is important not only in times of crisis, but all of the time.

So it was that Talking-Cure came about. After years in the cut and thrust of the business world, I saw a lot of casualties. Burn-out or breakdown, call it what you will, the end result was always similar from a human perspective and yet the machine still demanded to be fed. So I embarked on a mission to understand why and to see if I could make a difference, and what I found was that the challenges of the commercial world were not unlike those faced by everyone in today’s society. Anyone, from any generation can find that for whatever reason, ‘the world is too much for them’.

If we want to get physically fit we hire a personal trainer or go to the gym, we eat well, we watch our vices, it’s prevention rather than cure. So, why do we not extend that self-care to how we think and feel? It’s largely an issue of image, seeing a therapist is still not seen as what ‘we do’, but why? And more importantly, what are we missing out on?

I see mental health as being underpinned by mental fitness. We can improve our lives and how we feel by how we think, and thinking well is a skill we can learn like any other, with potential benefits in physical health, productivity and quality of life. The aim of this blog is to look at some of those elements of modern life that cause the most issues, informing you and hopefully helping.

The world that we have created is fast, demanding, competitive and at times unforgiving, yet we are not physiologically much different from our parents and their parents, who had to cope in far less challenging environments. Our children will face demands we probably can’t imagine. One thing we can do is lift our heads from the sand and use those advances in psychotherapy and the social sciences not when it all begins to fall apart, as a sticking plaster, but as a daily supplement to build fitter, stronger minds, more robust coping mechanisms and improve our lives.

I hope you will join me.