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Anxiety

Anxiety is an emotion characterised by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behaviour like pacing, somatic complaints, and rumination. It typically involves feelings of apprehension about future events, marked by “what-if” worries. While it can present with physical symptoms such as muscle tension, heart palpitations, sweating, dizziness, and shortness of breath, and emotional symptoms like restlessness or a sense of impending doom, anxiety is a natural and essential human experience. It serves a vital function by helping us to look ahead, organise ourselves, and gather the energy needed to get things done.

The main strategies for helping to relieve anxiety often involve changing one’s relationship with it rather than trying to eliminate it completely:

  • Mindfulness and Acceptance: This approach encourages facing anxiety, rather than avoiding or controlling it, by paying attention to the present moment without judgment. Techniques include deep, belly breathing to instantly calm the brain and body, observing thoughts without getting caught in their content, and willingness to experience anxious feelings as they are.
  • Lifestyle Adjustments: Regular physical exercise can significantly reduce anxiety by improving blood flow and balancing hormones. Ensuring adequate sleep is also crucial, as lack of it can exacerbate anxiety. A balanced diet, avoiding stimulants like caffeine and refined sugars, and focusing on complex carbohydrates, can also promote calmer moods.
  • Cognitive Strategies: This involves challenging anxious thoughts by questioning their validity and reframing negative interpretations of situations. Identifying specific triggers that provoke anxiety is a key step. Sometimes, simply writing down worries can help to gain clarity and reduce their power.
  • Behavioural Exposure: Gradually facing feared situations or internal sensations teaches the brain that these are not dangerous, which can reduce the anxiety response over time. This builds confidence and tolerance for discomfort.
  • Havening Techniques: These involve applying gentle self-touch (to the arms, face, or hands) while recalling a distressing memory or feeling. This touch, combined with distractions like counting or humming, can help to reduce distress and build resilience.

Rewiring the Anxious Brain: Practical Exercises and Techniques

Rewiring an anxious brain involves using a combination of techniques that target both the amygdala and cortex pathways. These exercises range from calming the amygdala through distraction and relaxation, to modifying cortex-based thoughts through cognitive restructuring, mindfulness, and values clarification. The key to success is understanding the different sources of anxiety and applying the appropriate strategies, while embracing the brain’s capacity for change through consistent practice and effort.

Get past your anxiety with the help of an anxiety management coach

an anxiety management coach focuses on empowering individuals to live full and meaningful lives by teaching them to change their relationship with anxiety. The emphasis is on managing responses to anxiety, rather than attempting to control or eliminate it, by building skills and confidence in the clients own ability to manage their experience.

Harnessing the Power of NLP: Techniques for Managing Anxiety

NLP techniques provide a range of approaches to address anxiety by changing the way one thinks, feels and behaves. By reframing anxiety, understanding triggers and using tools such as anchoring and timeline therapy, individuals can take control of their responses and move towards a more resourceful state of mind.

Anxious Feelings Coaching: Reclaiming Your Control

Anxious feelings coaching helps people to change their relationship with their thoughts and feelings so that these experiences have less power over their actions. Coaching emphasizes acceptance and encourages people to take actions that are guided by their values, rather than driven by their anxiety. By focusing on action, and empowering clients to make their own choices, coaching, ACT and SFBT enable people to reclaim control and live a full and meaningful life, even when feeling anxious.

Rewiring the Anxious Brain: Tools, Techniques and Strategies

Rewiring the brain from anxiety is an achievable goal that focuses on a change in the relationship with anxious thoughts and feelings. It requires a holistic approach, combining self-help strategies with professional support where needed. Key to this is accepting anxiety as a normal part of life and focusing on building skills and confidence to manage its effects, whilst taking action towards meaningful goals. By understanding the brain’s role in anxiety and using neuroplasticity to your advantage, it is possible to build a life where anxiety has less of an impact.

How Stress and Anxiety Coaching Can Be More Effective

Stress and anxiety, while interconnected, have key differences in their focus, triggers, and duration. Stress coaching can be effective because it takes a tailored approach that recognizes these nuances and focuses on what is controllable. The coach helps the client to identify what is causing their anxiety and/or stress and then teaches practical tools and skills to empower them to live a more meaningful, less stressful and less anxious life. By focusing on a client’s personal goals and values, coaching supports lasting change, promoting self-reliance and well-being.

Overcoming Anxiety: Beyond Willpower

Overcoming anxiety requires more than just willpower. It involves learning to break out of unhelpful habit loops, and a willingness to accept anxious thoughts and feelings, while focusing on making actions that are guided by values. This can involve self-help strategies or professional help. A crucial shift is moving away from trying to eliminate anxiety to learning to live with it, building a meaningful life and working towards personal goals in spite of anxious feelings.

How an Anxiety Coach Can Help You Overcome Anxiety and Thrive

Anxiety coaching provides a powerful combination of support, action-oriented techniques, and personalized strategies to help you overcome anxiety. A coach works with you to build a long-term, empowering relationship, so you can create new habits and achieve your goals. By emphasizing your strengths, clarifying your values, and learning effective coping skills, you can develop the resilience and confidence to live a more meaningful life. Coaching focuses on your values and your goals for the future, taking an approach rather than an avoidance goal.

Anxiety and the Brain: Understanding and Treating Anxiety with Havening

Anxiety involves the amygdala’s stress response to perceived threats, which can become heightened by encoded trauma. Havening is a powerful method that uses touch, attention, and visualisation to directly target the encoded memories in the amygdala, promoting relaxation and reducing anxiety. It is a gentle and rapid method that can be used as self-havening or facilitated by a therapist. Havening is considered more effective than some traditional approaches because it addresses the root cause of anxiety and trauma, is quick and effective, does not require the details of the trauma to be discussed and can be used to increase the effectiveness of traditional approaches to support well-being.

Why senior staff reach out to work with private anxiety councillors.

senior staff may prefer private anxiety support due to concerns about confidentiality and stigma, limitations of in-house resources, the demands of their roles, a desire for control and autonomy, a perception of higher value from private specialists, and a focus on performance outcomes. Private coaches are often seen as experts, who can tailor their approach and offer a confidential space for individuals to address their anxiety and move forward.

Does NLP work for anxiety

NLP is a method that aims to help people manage their anxiety by understanding how they create the experience of anxiety and then learning how to manage their mental processes and thoughts, to rewrite negative associations. NLP includes techniques like identifying triggers, reframing thoughts, setting anchors, and timeline therapy, and it focuses on helping individuals take control of their mental state. NLP works with the idea that each individual processes the world through a unique filter based on their experiences and memories.

How Therapist for Anxiety Help You

It’s important to note that the specific approach a therapist uses will depend on their training and the client’s individual needs. Some therapists might draw on a combination of techniques or work within a specific framework, such as ACT or SFBT. They may also encourage clients to seek support from other sources, such as friends, family, support groups or self-help resources. Overall, the goal is to empower clients to manage their anxiety effectively and live full and meaningful lives.

Anxiety and Depression Coaches: What do they do?

An anxiety and depression coach provides practical support and guidance to individuals who want to manage their anxiety and depression, build their confidence, achieve their goals, and improve their overall well-being. Coaches focus on empowering clients to develop and implement their own solutions, and they work collaboratively with clients to move towards a preferred future. Coaching offers a path to positive change through practical strategies, a focus on values and the development of new skills.

Havening Practitioner Can Help with Anxiety

A Havening practitioner uses Havening Techniques, a psychosensory approach, to help people overcome their anxiety by addressing the root causes of their distress and promoting relaxation and wellbeing. In addition to Havening touch, a practitioner may include other strategies such as mindfulness, values orientation, and self-care. A Havening practitioner could be a better choice for many people due to its focus on addressing the core emotional content of anxiety, the safe and gentle nature of its techniques, the rapid results, and the emphasis on self-empowerment. The ability to integrate Havening with other modalities, its versatility, its basis in neuroscience, and its holistic approach make it a powerful and effective tool for promoting healing and resilience.

The Havening Technique for Anxiety:Based on the new neuroscience of trauma.

Havening is a psychosensory treatment that uses touch to eliminate negative feelings associated with distressing memories, promoting relaxation and well-being. Unlike some approaches that primarily focus on managing symptoms, Havening targets the root cause of anxiety and trauma by depotentiating encoded memories in the amygdala. The technique is rapid, gentle and can be used alongside other approaches, making it a flexible and powerful tool for addressing a variety of conditions.