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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.

Understanding Somatic Flashbacks and Their Neurological Basis

Somatic flashbacks are the re-experiencing of physical sensations linked to past trauma, often occurring without a full narrative memory. Neurologically, they involve heightened activity in the right brain hemisphere and limbic areas, while areas responsible for logical processing, verbalisation, and sensory integration may be deactivated. Flashbacks can arise due to the way traumatic memories are encoded and stored in the brain, particularly in the amygdala and hippocampus, and can be triggered by sensory reminders. They impact the brain by reinforcing trauma-related neural pathways and disrupting normal cognitive and emotional processing. Strategies to reduce their severity and frequency include grounding techniques, mindfulness, various psychotherapies like SFBT, ACT, Havening, and EMDR, as well as somatic approaches and self-compassion practices.

Understanding Havening: A Novel Approach to Anxiety Relief

Havening Techniques® is a psychosensory method using touch, attention, and imagination to create electrochemical changes in the brain, primarily leading to the depotentiation of traumatically encoded memories in the amygdala. This approach differs from traditional anxiety treatments that often focus on cognitive restructuring and symptom management by directly addressing the neurological encoding of emotional distress. Havening enhances traditional therapies by acting as an integrative and rapid tool that can break through resistance, provide content-free processing, and create a sense of safety, thereby accelerating therapeutic progress. It positively impacts mental processes such as memory processing, emotional regulation, the sense of safety, and resilience. Self-Havening empowers individuals with a tool for self-care and stress management.

The Role of a Therapist for Anxiety

A competent therapist for anxiety will have specialised training in treating anxiety disorders and will prioritise the establishment of a good therapeutic connection with their clients. They recognise that seeking help for anxiety is a sign of courage, not weakness.

Overcoming Burnout at Work: Strategies for Individuals and Organisations

Overcoming burnout requires a dual approach: individuals must take proactive steps to manage their stress and cultivate well-being, while organisations must create supportive environments and implement policies that prioritise employee health. Strategies such as setting boundaries, practising mindfulness, clarifying values, and seeking support, combined with organisational efforts to manage workloads and foster empathy, can effectively mitigate burnout and promote a healthier, more productive workforce.

Best Therapy for Anxiety: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Modern therapists often use a multidisciplinary approach to identify the best therapy for anxiety, assessing client needs and matching therapies to specific mental processes. Techniques like CBT, exposure therapy, ACT, mindfulness-based therapies, and trauma-focused therapies address cognitive distortions, avoidance behaviours, emotional dysregulation, and traumatic memories. Relaxation techniques help manage physiological arousal.

Thriving Amidst the Chaos: The Overwhelm Coach Advantage

An overwhelm coach is valuable in the workplace for fostering supportive environments, developing emotional skills, and managing change effectively. They utilise various techniques, including solution-focused questioning, values clarification, havening and addressing barriers, to guide individuals towards thriving amidst workplace challenges.

Psychosensory Therapy: An Overview

Psychosensory therapy uses sensory input to alter moods, sensations, thinking and behaviour. Unlike talk and drug therapies, psychosensory therapy employs sensory input to generate an extrasensory response, affecting beneficial change in the brain. Techniques like Havening use touch to create delta waves, depotentiate traumatic experiences, and provide a healing haven for the amygdala. By addressing both the mind and body, psychosensory therapy offers an alternative or complementary approach to overcoming anxiety, phobias, stress and panic attacks, with potential advantages over traditional methods like CBT, especially in treating trauma.

Role of a Stress and Anxiety Coach

A stress and anxiety coach uses varied techniques to help people manage stress and anxiety, build resilience, and improve performance by teaching coping mechanisms and encouraging proactive approaches to life’s challenges.

Havening for Anxiety: Effectiveness, Usage, and Synergistic Approaches

Havening for anxiety is becoming increasingly popular due to its speed, gentleness, and effectiveness. It works by depotentiating traumatically encoded experiences in the amygdala and can be easily integrated with other modalities like hypnotherapy, NLP, mindfulness, anxiety coaching and HeartMath to provide a comprehensive solution. The ability to teach self-havening techniques also empowers clients to manage their anxiety independently.

The Best Treatment for Anxiety: A Personalised Approach

To determine the best treatment for anxiety, consider the following:

ACT is ideal for those caught in experiential avoidance, helping them accept inner experiences and commit to valued actions.
SFBT suits individuals preferring a future-focused, strengths-based approach to build positive emotions and solutions.
Psychodynamic Therapy Aims to address possibly unrecognised reasons for anxiety
NLP offers tools for reprogramming the mind and managing thought patterns, but requires active engagement and may not address root causes.

Tools and Techniques Used by a Stress Management Coach

A stress management coach uses diverse tools and techniques, including solution-focused questions, breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, mindfulness practices, cognitive restructuring, ACT, NLP, Havening Techniques, and lifestyle adjustments. These interventions aim to reduce stress, increase self-awareness, promote emotional regulation, and improve overall well-being, equipping individuals to lead more balanced and fulfilling lives.

Reasons to Seek Private Anxiety Therapy

Seeking private anxiety therapy can be beneficial for individuals significantly affected by anxiety due to the limitations of public healthcare, the opportunity for personalised care, and the expertise and experience of private therapists. Therapy can help address the root causes of anxiety, increase self-awareness, and provide individuals with the skills and resources to manage their anxiety more effectively.

Psycho Sensory Techniques: Tools for Therapists and Coaches

Psycho sensory techniques use sensory input to alter mood and behaviour. Techniques like Havening, EFT, EMDR, and mindfulness can be used by conventional therapists as adjuncts to talk therapy to treat trauma and reduce anxiety. Benefits include emotional regulation, stress reduction, self-awareness, and improved coping skills. Anxiety coaches use these techniques to reduce stress, build resilience, address trauma, and clarify values, enabling clients to manage overwhelm, burnout, and anxiety effectively.

Help from a Havening Techniques Practitioner: Conditions and Advantages

A havening techniques practitioner offers a unique approach to anxiety treatment, particularly for those with trauma, phobias, or treatment resistance. Havening’s strength lies in its rapid, gentle, and content-free method, which directly targets the neurological roots of anxiety and promotes lasting change. By creating a safe electrochemical environment and integrating with other therapeutic modalities, Havening empowers clients to heal from past traumas, manage present-day anxiety, and build resilience for the future.