The recommended approach to begin rewiring the brain to reduce anxiety is to first focus on calming the amygdala using relaxation, sleep, and exercise to reduce sympathetic nervous system activation. Then, identify triggers interfering with life goals and use exposure exercises to modify the amygdala’s response. Practice is essential, as the amygdala learns through experience; some anxiety during exposure is necessary for new connections to form.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for anxiety is an approach that shifts the focus from trying to eliminate or control anxiety symptoms to living a full and meaningful life with anxiety present. It helps you identify how your attempts to avoid uncomfortable internal experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations) may be limiting your life. Through acceptance, mindfulness, cognitive defusion, clarifying your values, and committing to value-guided action, ACT helps you build psychological flexibility. The goal is to drop the unworkable struggle against anxiety and instead take action that matters to you, allowing your experiences to be as they are.
Dealing with panic attacks involves understanding their nature as intense, temporary episodes of fear often linked to the fight-or-flight response. Rather than seeking to eliminate them, effective strategies focus on changing your relationship with the panic, learning to manage intense physical sensations and thoughts, and facing feared situations. Key techniques include understanding the physiological basis of panic symptoms, practising acceptance and willingness to experience intense feelings, using mindfulness to stay present, changing the relationship with catastrophic thoughts through techniques like questioning or defusion, learning and practising proper breathing and relaxation techniques outside of panic, gradually exposing yourself to feared symptoms and situations without avoidance, identifying personal triggers, productively shifting focus away from panic, and identifying protective factors and coping skills. While some foundational learning and skill practice can be done independently through self-help resources, working with a therapist is often recommended for implementing exposure strategies and navigating more challenging aspects of dealing with panic attacks. The goal is to gain more control over your response to panic, allowing you to live a fuller life.
This report outlines strategies for managing anxiety attacks based on information from the sources. It explains that anxiety attacks are temporary exaggerations of the stress response and not harmful. Key immediate actions include breathing techniques, relaxation, focusing on thoughts and sensations without judgment, using distraction, and resisting the urge to flee. Longer-term strategies involve identifying triggers, making plans, writing or journaling, challenging thoughts, adjusting language and reactions, practising self-care, seeking support, building understanding, and being persistent.
ACT for anxiety is an approach focused on changing your relationship with anxiety rather than trying to control or eliminate it. It posits that control efforts often exacerbate the problem. The goal is to help clients live a rich and meaningful life aligned with their values, even when anxiety is present. This is achieved through core processes: Acceptance (willingness to experience anxiety), Cognitive Defusion (changing the relationship with thoughts), Contacting the Present Moment (mindfulness), The Observing Self (perspective taking), Values (clarifying what matters), and Committed Action (taking steps towards values despite anxiety). These processes are seen as more beneficial than symptom control because they target underlying issues and foster psychological flexibility. Clients can use ACT for anxiety as a self-help tool by working through principles and exercises presented in workbooks, focusing on understanding the rationale, practising the core skills, identifying values, and taking committed action, using tools like monitoring forms and specific exercises like Conscious Questioning and FEEL exercises. The emphasis is on taking action with anxiety towards a valued life.
A coach specialising in depression focuses on helping individuals lift depression and manage related issues like stress and anxiety to improve performance and well-being. This involves helping clients define desired changes, understand their experiences, and solve problems. Key aspects may include setting clear, measurable goals, utilising accountability and support systems, and working in person or remotely. It is crucial to remember that coaching is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health treatment, particularly for clinical depression.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for anxiety is a process-based approach that helps individuals live a full and meaningful life while learning to coexist with anxiety. It does not view anxiety as a disease but as a normal human experience that can become problematic when one attempts to control or avoid it excessively. Key principles include acceptance (willingness to experience difficult thoughts and feelings without struggle), mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment nonjudgmentally), cognitive defusion (changing one’s relationship with thoughts), clarifying personal values (chosen life directions), and taking committed action (steps towards values, even with anxiety). The goal is not necessarily anxiety reduction itself, but building psychological flexibility to engage in a rich and meaningful life, guided by values.
Depression coaching is not a clearly defined practice. However, by combining insights from descriptions of coaching, depression, and related therapeutic approaches like Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), one can infer potential elements of such a practice. These might include focusing on desired futures and goals, identifying strengths, setting specific and measurable steps, challenging unhelpful language, incorporating acceptance of difficult feelings, aligning actions with personal values, using scaling to track progress, and encouraging action despite challenging emotions, all while being mindful of the specific obstacles presented by depressive symptoms such as lethargy and lack of hope. Coaching principles emphasise working with a person’s motivation and using language that resonates with them.
Traditional therapeutic approaches often focus on exploring the underlying causes and history of problems, sometimes requiring significant time. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), conversely, was developed by studying patterns of excellence and focuses on the structure of a person’s thoughts, language, and behaviour – the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. This focus on the mechanics of subjective experience, combined with techniques designed to access subconscious processes, establish outcomes, and empower the individual by highlighting their control over their internal states, can contribute to faster and potentially more lasting changes. NLP offers specific techniques like anchoring, timeline therapy, reframing, and belief change to facilitate rapid shifts in perspective and behaviour. Its principles and techniques are widely applied in modern fields such as coaching, where they are used to improve communication, understand client patterns, set goals, and motivate action. While NLP’s focus on outcomes and linguistic precision aligns with some principles of Solution-Focused Therapy, the sources do not explicitly detail an integration. Furthermore, the provided material does not describe how NLP is integrated into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, presenting ACT as a distinct approach focused on acceptance, mindfulness, values, and committed action.
Mental freedom involves liberation from the dictation of your thoughts, allowing you to choose how to respond to your inner experience and the world. It is achieved not by controlling or eliminating unwanted thoughts and feelings, but by learning to relate to them differently through practices like mindfulness and acceptance. Key strategies include paying non-judgemental attention to the present moment, seeing thoughts as separate from reality, accepting and making space for difficult emotions, challenging unhelpful thinking patterns, and committing to actions aligned with your values. Cultivating self-awareness, self-compassion, and a supportive inner voice are also vital. The benefits are extensive, including reduced suffering, increased positive emotions, clarity on values, greater control over your actions (rather than your feelings), reduced stress, enhanced mental flexibility, improved relationships with yourself and your inner experience, and ultimately, a happier and more vital life where you are not defined by your challenges but are empowered to move towards what matters.
ACT and CBT offer distinct approaches to addressing anxiety. CBT often focuses on identifying and challenging maladaptive thoughts and reducing symptoms by altering thought content and structure. It also utilises exposure to counter avoidance. ACT, conversely, views avoidance and control efforts as key problems that paradoxically worsen suffering. Its goal is not symptom reduction but helping clients live a full, valued life by fostering psychological flexibility. ACT employs defusion to change the relationship with thoughts rather than disputing them and promotes acceptance and willingness to experience internal sensations and emotions fully, often using mindfulness and exposure techniques reframed within an acceptance context. While CBT is seen as a traditional behavioural/cognitive approach, ACT is considered a newer wave that integrates some CBT techniques within a broader framework centred on acceptance, mindfulness, values, and committed action.
Rewiring the anxious brain leverages the brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity to change its responses to anxiety. Anxiety is understood to involve the amygdala and cortex pathways. Techniques targeting the amygdala, such as exposure therapy, relaxation, exercise, and Havening, aim to modify emotional memories and threat responses through experience and direct neurological intervention. Techniques targeting the cortex, like cognitive restructuring and mindfulness, focus on changing anxious thoughts, interpretations, and awareness. Other approaches such as NLP, SFBT, Hypnotherapy, and Neurofeedback also contribute to this process by addressing subconscious factors, promoting solution-focused thinking, conditioning relaxation responses, or directly altering brainwave patterns. A Havening therapist is particularly integral to this process by facilitating amygdala depotentiation through techniques like Havening and guiding clients in self-practices such as CPR for the Amygdala, enabling effective and controlled healing of trauma and building resilience. The goal is to build new neural pathways that resist anxiety and allow individuals to live more fully according to their values.
Many professional people and senior management seek anxiety treatment, often in private settings, due to the severe impact anxiety has on their careers, performance, and relationships. They may seek effective and tailored solutions beyond temporary symptom relief, favouring approaches that focus on performance, well-being, and client control. Stigma, embarrassment, and the need for privacy to address what can feel like a secret problem are significant motivators for choosing private treatment. They may also be looking for alternative approaches if previous attempts at managing anxiety, particularly through avoidance, have proven costly and ineffective.
Havening Techniques for anxiety are a psychosensory treatment using touch to generate delta waves in the brain, which is understood to depotentiate distress encoded in the amygdala. Practitioners guide clients through Havening Touch or Self-Havening, working with issues like panic attacks, phobias, stress, and trauma. A key benefit is the ability to work content-free, meaning clients do not need to verbally disclose details of distressing events. Havening acts as a valuable addition to existing therapeutic toolkits, potentially enhancing the effectiveness of other modalities. It is seen as surpassing traditional anxiety treatments in its described speed, efficacy, and gentleness, allowing clients to process difficult experiences without re-traumatisation. The real-time results and focus on underlying neurological processes are highlighted as particular strengths. While still gaining wider recognition, practitioners find it transforms their practise and provides a powerful self-care tool.
This report has examined coaching for depression, drawing on principles and techniques found in various therapeutic modalities. Coaching-informed approaches differ from traditional therapy by focusing on solutions and positive emotions rather than problems, viewing the client as the expert rather than the therapist, and emphasising possibilities over impossibilities. Potential advantages include building confidence, fostering hope, and promoting action-oriented strategies. For clients, coaching can be preferable due to feeling more understood, empowered, and less blamed. Practitioners may benefit from a more collaborative role and the fulfillment of helping clients achieve lasting positive change. A critical element in coaching for depression is the constant monitoring of progress, often done through scaling questions, tracking goal achievement, and regular check-ins to identify what is better. Key techniques include using positive focus, finding exceptions, externalising problems, challenging negative thoughts, setting SMART goals, and promoting behavioral activation.